


Call the Midwife -- Eldrich Horror Episode

by ARealPip



Series: Angel Baby [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Aziraphale kidnaps a human, Birth horror. Do not read if you are pregnant, Crowley gives birth, Eldrich Horror, Gen, Happy Family, Hurt Crowley (Good Omens), M/M, Medical Emergency, Medical Horror, Mentions of many flavors of bigotry, Mpreg, OC midwife, all's well that ends well, barbaric surgery, healthy baby demon-angel, homebirth gone wrong, outsider point of view, what it says on the tin, winged baby
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-07
Updated: 2020-02-14
Packaged: 2021-02-27 06:08:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,801
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22152277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ARealPip/pseuds/ARealPip
Summary: Crowley and Aziraphale are having a baby.  Crowley thought he could give birth on his own at home.  But when a male demon tries to birth a winged baby, things turn complicated, so Aziraphale kidnaps a human midwife to help out.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Angel Baby [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1594474
Comments: 328
Kudos: 640





	1. Kidnapped

**Author's Note:**

> There are a lot of GO fics where one of our ineffable duo switch up their genitals for a little bit of sexy time fun. The rest of their bodies often seem to stay the same. 
> 
> There are also a lot of stories where one of them changes his body for sex and then gets stuck there after he becomes pregnant. In these stories, the body cannot be changed until after the baby is born.
> 
> In almost all these stories, the births are so easy. 
> 
> But if we combine the two tropes we actually have a recipe for a disaster. Crowley's hips may be made for tempting but they are not childbearing hips. And wings on a baby cannot make for an easy birth. 
> 
> So here it is: a traumatic birth story for the ineffable parents

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are pregnant, or plan to become pregnant soon, maybe you shouldn't read this fic. Go on to the next one in the series. It has a nice empowering birth. 
> 
> This is a graphic and deeply realistic birth horror story. (Events described wouldn't happen if only our characters had access to a modern hospital.)
> 
> You are hereby warned.

Natalie Fernsby was having trouble with her migraines. They were the actually the only thing that had ever been able to slow her down. Now that she was fifty-five years old, they very rarely happened. But today the auras had hit her and she'd forgotten exactly where she was and what she was doing. She expected that there would be a minute of two of visual and auditory distortions before she was able to orient. Natalie waited patiently. She took some slow deep breaths. She could see, through her eyelids, that the light was very bright, and she could tell that she was sitting on a bench. She felt around for her purse. There was an emergency Sumatriptan tablet in there. She heard a man's voice nearby. 

"Right," said the man. "Not to worry. You'll be feeling better in a jiffy and then we can be off."

Natalie dared to open her eyes a crack and realized that she was sitting in one of the corridors at the Royal College of Midwives in London. There was a white haired man that she didn't know standing above her. He looked concerned.

"I'll be fine," said Natalie to the man. "This happens sometimes." Her confident and calming tone of voice was well practiced. For thirty-four years, Natalie Fernsby had specialized in facilitating healthy vaginal births for patients with special needs. The kind white haired stranger hovering over Natalie would have no earthly way of knowing it, but a sudden migraine was nothing compared to the kinds of challenges she faced every week. 

Natalie thrived on challenges. She was the sort of person who did what she thought was right, regardless of what anyone else was doing. Natalie passionately believed in the right of every pregnant person to make their own decisions about their own body, and she had spent her long career fighting for her cause. Long before any other midwife would, Natalie Fernsby had taken on patients with Down syndrome. She'd taken non-binary and transgender patients before the medical establishment even knew they existed. She attended at the births of the very old and the very young, the parents expecting fragile and complex babies, the medically traumatized parents, and the physically complex ones. In the past, her preference for challenging patients had earned Natalie nothing but a strange reputation and a much higher C-section rate than other midwives. But now the tide was turning. The lecture she had just given, on how to give paraplegics the best possible chance for a healthy vaginal birth, had been packed, with young midwives sitting in the aisles to take their notes. 

Natalie Fernsby was used to taking charge in every situation. This moment was no exception. Even though she was feeling disoriented, Natalie was not going to let some stranger worry over her little migraine. One of the things she hated about working in the medical field was how people fussed over these sorts of things. This white haired man, for example. He was very kind to have chased off all of the people who had followed her into the corridor to ask questions, but Natalie was absolutely able to handle the situation herself. She rummaged through her purse with her eyes closed and pulled out the blister pack containing the emergency migraine medicine. She tore it open and emptied the tiny tablet into her hand. She was planning to dry swallow it, but something stopped her. She had a funny feeling that she shouldn't take any medicine that might impair her.

She closed her eyes again and tried to remember what she was doing before the migraine auras started. Right. She had been talking with this nice man. He had wanted her to go with him and he had been in an awful hurry. 

Natalie opened her eyes again. The man was holding her hand, the one that held the pill. 

"This pill won't be necessary," said the kind man, "You are feeling better already."

It was true. Already Natalie's memories were coming back. She was about to visit somebody who was hoping to do a home birth. Somebody who was concerned that they wouldn't be treated well in a hospital setting. And her woozy distorted feeling was passing rapidly. She wedged the pill back into its blister pack and stuck it back into her purse. 

"The car is right outside," said the white haired man. "I'll carry your bags." That was strange. Natalie didn't usually carry all her medical bags on a first visit to a home birth client. 

Natalie got into the Uber and the white haired man sat down in the back seat next to her.

"Can you remind me of your name again, sir?", said Natalie.

"I'm Aziraphale," said the man. "I'm the father."

"Right," said Natalie. She remembered now. "And you said that your partner identifies as male, and he wants some privacy around the birth."

"Yes." The father nodded. One of his hands made a little flutter. It must be a nervous tic. He must be a nervous fellow. Now that Natalie looked at him properly, she saw that he looked rumpled. His shirt sleeves were rolled up and the shirt was untucked and wrinkled. His blonde-white hair was a mess of disheveled curls. It was odd that he hadn't smartened up for his first meeting with his midwife, but Natalie Fernsby had seen all sorts of people in her long career. She hoped that the household wouldn't be as sloppy and messy as the father was. 

"Completely understandable," said Natalie. She smiled. "First child for you both?", she asked. The father nodded again. "Don't worry, Aziraphale," she said. "I'll take good care of your partner. I believe that everyone deserves to feel safe and comfortable when they are giving birth. I can't wait to meet him."

Aziraphale still seemed very concerned, so Natalie caught his eye again and gave him a confident smile. "I've been doing this for over thirty years. I've seen it all." 

The poor father flinched and smiled in a strained sort of way. 

"Can you tell me approximately how far along in the pregnancy your partner is?", said Natalie. She was feeling very relaxed and confident even though she was struggling to remember the details of how she'd agreed to take on this client. 

"Um," said the father, "Rather far along, I'm afraid. But he's had excellent health the whole time. He's very strong. No need to worry." The father's eyes were fixed on the road ahead. His hands were making more fluttering motions. He was leaning forward so that he was almost hanging over the front seat. He looked almost as though he was trying to will the car to go faster. It wasn't needed. The little car caught every green light.

When the map on the dashboard showed them one minute from their destination, the father pulled a bunch of paper money out of the pocket of his trousers. 

"We'll just do a home visit and an examination today, and we'll talk about expectations around the birth," said Natalie. "How does that sound?"

The man nodded, quickly. "Perfectly lovely," he said. His words were light, but his tone was clipped. 

"You live close by, don't you?", said Natalie. "That's lucky. What was that? Seven blocks?"

The father nodded again. "Pull up at the corner," he said to the driver. The man did, and the car hadn't even stopped rolling when the father threw the handful of notes into the front seat.

"But that's not how--", said the driver. 

"There's a good fellow," said the father. His hands fluttered nervously again. The driver picked up the money and shook his head as if he had water in his ears. Before Natalie quite knew what was happening, the disheveled father was standing outside the car on her side, holding the car door open and carrying her medical bags. She stepped onto the sidewalk on a commercial street in Soho. The father led her into an antiquated bookshop. It had shelves from floor to ceiling, and the shelves were packed with books that looked to be from fifty to hundreds of years old. Many of them were leather bound. It felt like being in a very old university library. 

"My partner is just upstairs," said the father. He led her up the stairs, to the upper floor of the shop, which had even more floor to ceiling bookshelves. The whole building had a soft silence to it. Natalie could barely hear her own footfalls on the wooden floor. It almost felt like all sounds were absorbed. 

"This shop is amazing. Is it yours?", said Natalie. Her own voice was almost inaudible to her. She felt a little concerned. Maybe the funny sound quality wasn't caused by the shop. Maybe this was another migraine aura. She might have to take that pill after all. 

"Yes," said the father. "Thank you." Natalie could barely even hear his voice. He led her around a set of shelves to a narrow door hidden in the wall. The door was painted the same color as the wall. He turned around and stood in front of the door. His body seemed to be vibrating with strain. He squeezed his eyes shut and cocked his head as if he was listening to something, though there was no sound. Then, as if he had been waiting for something, his face relaxed a bit. He pressed his lips together and searched Natalie's face. His nervous hands fluttered again. His voice was suddenly louder. The very air around Natalie seemed to shimmer and grow cool as she heard him speak. 

"You'll need to remain very calm when you meet him," said the disheveled father. 

"Of course," said Natalie. "I promise." 

As the man opened the hidden door to his flat, Natalie opened her purse to rummage for her pill. The auras were very distracting. The father led Natalie into a narrow hall covered in a classic Victorian wallpaper. It had a dizzying blue and gold tapestry pattern that didn't help her eyes at all. 

"My partner is just in the bedroom," said the father. "Please wait here. I'll tell him you've arrived." He set Natalie's bags down in a place where the hall widened and turned into a tiny kitchen. He disappeared through a door in the wall of the kitchen. Oddly, Natalie's migraine auras faded just as the father left the kitchen. She abandoned her search for the pill and took in her surroundings.

In over thirty years of home births Natalie Fernsby had never seen a flat like this. The tiny kitchen she was standing in looked like a museum. A Victorian era iron stove was backed up against a brick wall on one side of the room. Next to the stove were some old fashioned free standing wooden cabinets. There was no sign of a fridge at all. The deep soapstone sink had legs and a gooseneck faucet. Natalie was impressed. Choosing to live in a precisely replicated Victorian home showed intense dedication.

Historical restoration was not the couple's only hobby. Natalie looked out the window of the kitchen's back door and there was a little balcony with a half wall. The balcony had been enclosed with windows to make a greenhouse that was filled, top to bottom, with verdant plants. 

Their hobbies weren't the only things this couple was intense about. Natalie could hear the sounds of an argument coming from the bedroom. "No, I can't put them away," a strained voice said. There was a murmured reply. And then: "What did you expect? You left me." Then the speaker lowered his voice and Natalie couldn't make out the rest of it.

Natalie wanted to do right by these clients, so she inspected her surroundings very carefully. The flat was very small and very strange. But would it be a safe place to give birth? Natalie had a habit of being open minded and finding possibilities where other midwives wouldn't. She noted that the home was spotlessly clean and in perfect repair. The paint on the mullioned window of the kitchen's rear door was new and uncracked. That was good. No lead paint hazard. The cast iron stove, however, was an insurmountable problem. It couldn't possibly be made safe for an infant. The whole thing would heat up to extraordinary temperatures. The wood smoke would be a problem for tiny lungs. Worse still, there were no smoke detectors or carbon monoxide detectors anywhere. Sadly, the flat was a fire hazard in other ways as well. The electrical system was the most out of date that Natalie had ever seen. The light fixture on the ceiling looked very old, and the exposed wiring didn't look modern. There weren't even proper outlets anywhere. 

It was a shame, Natalie thought. Even if they wanted to, the parents probably couldn't renovate this flat in time for the birth. This was definitely going be a tough conversation. She was going to have to gain the trust of a transgender man who probably didn't trust the medical profession, and then she'd have to tell him and his partner that their beautiful historic home needed to be abandoned. This was going to be heartbreaking. Natalie hated to break a patient's heart. 

The air was suddenly split by the sound of groans and then shrieks. Natalie reflexively pulled out her mobile and unlocked it. She was independent by nature, but this sounded like a situation that might require back up. 

Before Natalie could dial 999, the bedroom door burst open and Aziraphale came out. His eyes went wide as he watched her react to the sounds coming from the room behind him. He held the door shut. He was blocking her from getting into the bedroom. 

All midwives are part social worker. They need to have good judgement and the ability to read a situation. Natalie looked around the neat-as-a-pin little flat with its lovingly maintained Victorian appliances and then she looked at the incongruously disheveled man with his white fly away hair and his rumpled clothes. She listened to the terribly familiar painful sounds coming from the bedroom. Natalie Fernsby had a very good idea of what was happening in this strange household. She needed to asses how bad the situation was. In order to do this she needed to gain the trust of the frightened man who was keeping her from the patient. She very deliberately used his first name.

"Aziraphale. Your partner is in labor isn't he?"

Aziraphale gave a pained nod. 

"How long has he been in labor?"

"Since Tuesday evening."

Natalie struggled to keep her voice calm. That was two and a half days. Far too long. "And you've been taking care of him all on your own?"

Another nod. 

The sounds from the bedroom faded to whimpers.

"Aziraphale," said Natalie. "You've been very brave. Now it's time for you to let me help out. Okay?" 

Aziraphale shook his head and plastered himself in front of the door. "Wait," he said. "His body isn't going to look like a normal person's." 

"I've seen all sorts of bodies," said Natalie. "I promise, I'll treat him very respectfully." 

Aziraphale didn't move. He looked panicked and indecisive. 

"Please," said Natalie. "Let me help." 

"You need to--", said Aziraphale. His hands made a nervous flittery motion. "You are going to stay very calm. Extremely calm." 

The air seemed to become cool and still as Aziraphale stopped speaking. As he stepped out of her way, he gave Natalie a little nod that seemed to indicate that she should agree with him. But it wasn't needed. Natalie was not at all intimidated by the prospect of taking care of a transgender man who was afraid of medical personel and had been in labor for days. She was feeling calm and centered. Time seemed to slow. Natalie Fensby was in her element. She was attending a home birth for a family that needed special care. 

Aziraphale took the mobile out of Natalie's hand. She didn't resist him at all. He picked up her medical bags and handed them to her. He pulled the bedroom door open. The tiny room was shadowy, its windows covered with dark curtains. Natalie peered into it. 

There was a four poster bed with dark green bed curtains and an intricate quilt. The quilt was stained and stiff with dried bodily fluids. A thing was crouched on top of the bed with its arms wrapped around one of the posts. It had huge black feathered wings and yellow slitted eyes that glowed in the darkness like a cat's eyes. Its face, nearly human, was distorted with pain and covered with tears. It was grimacing and panting. Its teeth were fangs. It had stringy red hair that hung limply around its face. Its face and neck and arms and chest looked like that of a slender man, with pale peach colored skin. It had a belly like a pregnant woman, low and rounded and huge, but the bottom of the belly was covered in a black and red scaly pattern, and the creature's legs were covered entirely in black and red scales. The creature turned its yellow eyes toward Natalie. 

"Please help me," it said. "Something's gone wrong."


	2. Bigotry and the Occultist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natalie realizes that she is trapped in a flat with creepy non-human creatures with magical powers. Will she escape with her life?

Natalie Fernsby was standing in an eerily preserved Victorian flat and looking at an occult monster and feeling very calm. She was very calmly realizing that her situation reminded her of a rather spooky television series that she enjoyed. There were aliens in it, and almost every episode began with some hapless person wandering into a surreal situation much like the one she found herself in. 

The mistake made by all the people in the opening minutes of the television show was that they hesitated before they tried to get away. Natalie did not make this mistake. 

The medical bags hadn't even hit the floor by the time Natalie was running. It only took three strides for her to reach the front door of the tiny flat. The white haired occultist followed her and stood at the junction of the kitchen and the little hallway and shouted something at her as she very calmly worked the old fashioned door knob. There was a funny button on it, and she wasn't quite sure which position unlocked it. Natalie methodically moved the button back and forth and twisted the knob and rattled the door and then she very calmly came to the realization that the occultist had more than just mental magics. 

She turned to face him. He looked confused and off balance. Fortunately, Natalie's mind was very clear, and she knew that she had seconds to immobilize him physically before he did whatever mental magic he decided to do next. 

The occultist stood in the space where the tiny hall opened into the cramped kitchen and he raised his hands in what could be interpreted as a calming gesture, but Natalie knew better. Before he could do something else to her mind, she tucked her chin to her chest and charged. 

The distance between them was about three meters, which was enough distance for Natalie to get just enough speed without giving the white haired occultist any time to react. Natalie was not a small woman and she easily outweighed her captor. She felt his soft belly give way as her shoulder slammed into him. She drove him back as she tackled him. She knocked him over, landing on top of him and cracking the back of his head on the tiled kitchen floor. She pinned him in the narrow space between the kitchen table and the open bedroom door with her forearm pressed against his neck. His blue eyes widened and he made little choking sounds as he smothered underneath the weight of nearly 100 kilos of very angry midwife. 

"Aziraphale!", groaned the creature on the bed. "Help me!" It closed its eyes and held onto the bedpost and writhed. It bared its teeth and whined. Then it started to scream and then shriek as its body spasmed. The powerful muscles of its arms tightened around the bedpost. Its wings tightened against its back. Its abdomen rippled. 

As he heard the creature's shrill cries, the occultist's body stiffened underneath Natalie, and then, suddenly, with a burst of inhuman strength, he threw her off, scrambled to his feet and rushed back into the bedroom. 

"I've got you love, I've got you," the occultist cried. He put his hands on the creature's belly and the creature's shrieks quieted. It panted for a half a minute and then it rested its head on the white haired man's shoulder and started to sob quietly. 

"I'm scared," it said. 

"I know it hurts, darling," said the occultist. "You've been so brave."

"We're losing the baby," said the creature, "I can tell."

"Crowley," said the occultist, "Look at me." The creature didn't lift its head. It kept its eyes buried in the occultist's crumpled shirt. The occultist ran his fingers along the creature's temple and cheek and jaw. A minute passed as the occultist tried unsuccessfully to get the creature to lift its head and open its eyes. Then the occultist whispered into the creature's ear. "We are going to be brave," he said. "And we are going to save our baby."

The occultist looked down at Natalie, sprawled as she was on the kitchen floor. His words were clipped and short. "I supposed its best for all of us if you just go and forget you ever met us," he said. "The door is unlocked. Leave your bags. We'll try to return the equipment." Two of his fingers twitched and the unnatural calm lifted from Natalie's mind. The magician turned away as if Natalie didn't exist. He gave his full attention to the creature. He smoothed his hands over the creature's wings. "I will take care of it darling. I have the needful things. I will do what is necessary to bring our little one into the world." He kissed the creature on the forehead. "It will be over soon."

The creature shook its head back and forth and pushed the white haired man away. It started to pant. Another contraction was coming. It turned its head to the doorway of the bedroom and it looked down at Natalie. The slit pupils of its yellow eyes were wide. Its face looked wrecked and desperate. 

"Please," it said. "Please help us."

For the next thirty seconds, the only sound in the little flat was the sound of pained breathing. The breaths became more rapid and shallow, and then there was a little hitching sound and a soft groan that rose into whimpers and then the inevitable shrieks as powerful muscular contractions ground the baby into the unyielding bones of the pelvis. Natalie sat on the floor. She glanced from her watch to the winged creature and back to her watch again. The contractions were very close together. She was going to have to make a decision.

\-------------------------------------------------------------------

Once, Natalie had taken a client who had no arms. Her name was Gemma, and she was one of the rare clients who instantly felt like an old friend. Like Natalie, Gemma didn't believe in letting other people's discomfort determine her limits. Gemma drove a car with a steering wheel on the floor, she ate with her feet in fancy restaurants, and she did a stand-up routine on amateur nights at a local comedy club. Natalie adored Gemma's fighting spirit, and the two of them joked and laughed through the inevitable tests and all the concerned doctors with their caveats and their back up plans. Everything went smoothly, right up until labor. Gemma was installed in a prime hospital suite. Natalie was coaching her. The laboring mother was balanced on a yoga ball with her husband supporting her from behind. The first stage of labor was progressing beautifully, and then the door opened and the attending physician swept in, with three medical students in his wake. He and his students turned Gemma from a person into a thing with just their eyes and the tones of their voices. By the time Natalie evicted them from the room, Gemma's labor had stalled. She lost her confidence. It took five hours and almost every trick in Natalie's arsenal to get labor restarted; they nearly had to resort to a C-section. 

Many times in her life, Natalie had been told that it was a waste of her time to try so hard for patients who were just "inevitably" going to need a C-section. Why give patients "like that" false hope? Why scare them when C-sections were so safe and easy? This wasn't Caesar's time, when a baby might be brutally cut from the belly of a mother who couldn't be saved or whose slim chance of surviving the birth was weighted as less than the value of a potential male heir. This was the most routine of modern surgeries. There was anesthesia. There were a dozen people in the room. There were many hands to provide gauze to soak up the fluids that might interfere with the doctor's ability to cut accurately. There were many hands to quickly pull the baby out, and to get the placenta free of the uterus so that the patient wouldn't bleed out. If something went wrong there were IV's and units of blood and drugs of all sorts on hand. The chance of the mother dying during surgery was quite small. 

Still, as a person who truly valued the lives and health of pregnant people, Natalie did everything should could to avoid the necessity of C-sections for her patients. Hospital Cesareans were relatively safe for the birthing parent, it was true. But not as safe as vaginal birth. At a minimum, they required more recovery time. Almost everyone had adhesions, and everyone's future pregnancies became higher risk. And then there were those never-rare-enough times when the slip of a knife or an allergic reaction or a blood clot caused life-altering complications and even death. So whenever anyone told Natalie that her patient didn't deserve every chance to try for a healthy vaginal birth, what Natalie heard was that the life of that patient was not valued. It was bigotry. 

Natalie had never understood bigotry at all. She never understood what force inside a person could so overwhelm their humanity that they would respond to another human being with disgust and fear. When she was a teenager, and strangers began to share their unsolicited opinions about the size and shape of her own body, Natalie had come to understand that some people felt ownership over the bodies of others. Years later, in an effort to understand it all, she'd eavesdropped on some other young midwives in training as they gossiped about the body differences of a patient who they "weren't comfortable" with. She listened carefully to their words, but she just couldn't imagine the emotional landscape inside her classmates. How could the compassion that they showed to all their other patients just evaporate because the patient was a bit unusual? It would be over three decades before Natalie finally understood. 

\------------------------------------------------------------------

Sitting on the tile floor of a flat that had been hidden from time by occult magic, her mind oscillating between primal terror and deep compassion, Natalie finally had the insight that let her understand bigotry. Bigotry happened when a person was concerned about their own survival. Bigotry made it easier to make a selfish choice. At this moment, choosing to see the beings in front of her as non-people would allow Natalie to run away with a clear conscience. But if she let herself care about the suffering parent and his dying baby, then she had to try to save them. And after she did, she might be murdered by the magician so that she would never reveal the existence of his strange inhuman family. 

In a hidden flat, where no one could ever find her, sprawled on the floor between the kitchen table and the door of the dark bedroom, Natalie tried to make up her mind. Was she looking at an occult master torturing his unworldly thrall, or was she looking at a desperate man who was watching his partner suffer through an obstructed labor? The great black wings that quivered with every contraction, did they belong to a monster or to a person? Was the white haired man a ruthless kidnapper or a desperate father? Could someone who was able to control another person's mind with magic be trusted? Was she willing to bet her life on that? 

Natalie watched the magician's eyes as he smoothed his hands over his partner's belly. He touched his lips to the black and red scales and he whispered something to the baby inside. He kissed the belly and whispered again. Natalie watched his eyes. She saw no calculation, no possessiveness, no cruelty, in those eyes. There was just love and the fear of losing the ones he loved. He was a human being. She'd just have to hope that, after this was all over, he would see her as a human being too. 

Natalie waited for the magician to finish talking to his baby. Then she cleared her throat and met the yellow eyes of the winged man.

"I'm Natalie," she said to him. "I'm going to be your midwife. What would you like me to call you?"


	3. Examination

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natalie figures out what is wrong with Crowley's labor and she proposes a brutal solution.

"Crowley," said the winged man. "Just Crowley is fine. My partner is Aziraphale. Tell us what you need from us." 

Alien or occult creature that he was, she could tell that he was frightened. There was something very human about how the muscles around his eyes moved and the way he sucked his lower lip. There were fangs, it was true, and reptilian eyes, but there was a person in there, a person who was afraid and in pain. And she could deal with him as a person. 

"Okay Crowley," she said. "I'm going to wash my hands and unpack a few supplies, and then I'm going to need to come in to your room. I'm going to ask your partner to turn on as many lights as possible so that I can look you over."

"Lights," said Aziraphale. "Right-o." And he bustled around the room and switched on a weak little reading lamp and an equally dim bedside lamp.

Natalie took it all in. She looked around the bedroom and she watched the white haired magician and the winged reptile man, and she tried to learn everything about them. There wasn't much time to get to know them. This was a crisis. In a few moments, she would need to be very intimate with this couple-- touching them, moving their bodies about, being with them in extremis, and, if all went well, shepherding them safely to the moment of their life's greatest joy. There wasn't much time to waste, but in order to do her job, she needed to slip into their family seamlessly and gain their trust and cooperation. 

In the one minute she allowed herself to learn about her strange new clients, Natalie saw how Crowley closed his eyes and turned away from the lights, dim as they were. She saw how Aziraphale immediately rushed over to him with a pair of sunglasses. She saw how gently he brushed the hair back from Crowley's face and slipped the sunglasses over his ears and onto his nose, smoothing his thumbs over both cheekbones before his hands slipped away and found their way back to their normal position on the bottom of Crowley's belly.

In her one minute, Natalie also took in every detail of the dimly lit little bedroom. The room was only slightly deeper than the four poster bed, but it was relatively wide. The bed divided the room into two sides. On the side of the bed where Aziraphale was holding Crowley's belly and Crowley was clinging to the bedpost, there was an open space and then a window covered by a heavy curtain. Next to the window was an arm chair with a little ottoman, a side table and a reading lamp and some neatly stacked books. There was a full length free-standing mirror in the corner. There wasn't a speck of dust anywhere. 

The wall on the opposite side of the room, the non-window side, was completely crammed with an old fashioned wardrobe, a low dresser, and, in the corner, a little cot with a mobile hanging over it. On top of the low dresser were stacks of neatly folded baby clothes and a stuffed duck. That side of the room was hidden from view by the sudden spreading of Crowley's great black wings. They divided the tiny room like a curtain as he moaned in anticipation of the next contraction. 

While Aziraphale helped Crowley through the contraction, Natalie washed her hands in the cold water provided by the Victorian sink. She put on a stethoscope and head torch. Fortunately, since Crowley wasn't the first laboring parent to hate light, she was prepared. She put a visor on her head to shield the top of the torch and help control the direction of the light. Then she stood in the door way, torch still off, pulling her gloves on while she quickly asked for permission to do all of the things that were going to be necessary to figure out how to save this parent and baby.

"Crowley," she said. "I'm going to enter the room now. I'm going to have your partner move off to the side so I can examine you. I need to find how baby is positioned so that I can help baby to come out. I'm going use a bright light. I'm going to touch and press on your belly and then I'm going to put my hands between your legs. I'm going to touch your genitals. I am going to put my hands inside your body. Do you understand?"

She was already kneeling on the floor beneath him when he answered. 

"Yep," he replied. 

Still crouching on the bed, Crowley unwrapped one of his arms from the bedpost and draped it over his partner's shoulder, so his belly faced toward her. When she turned on her light and put her hand on his belly, he turned his head away so that he seemed to be staring at the wall over his partner's shoulder. His wings rustled and drew back as if he was about to take flight. The wings brushed up against the open door of the bedroom and the canopy of the bed and they seemed to suck all the light out of the room.

As she pressed and prodded and measured his body with her hands, Natalie tried to absorb not only the physical shape of Crowley, but who he was as a person. She quickly figured out that he hated to be touched. At least by her. She could feel the subtle way he suppressed the flinching of the flesh underneath her hands and the not-so-subtle way his wings twitched every time she moved her hands to a new location. Like a wild animal, he had a powerful instinct to get away from her. Perhaps he was a dragon. 

Natalie handled Crowley's body with firm touches and gentle descriptions of what she needed to do. He endured stoically, breathing shallowly, staring off at a featureless wall, resting his chin on his partner's shoulder while Aziraphale filled his ear with an endless murmur of reassuring sounds. Natalie could make out some of the words. "My love . . . so brave . . . there we are . . . doing so well . . . staying nice and still . . . our baby . . . soon be together . . ." Still holding onto the bedpost, Crowley leaned into his partner, absorbing comfort from him. 

Natalie was used to clients whose bodies had weaknesses and disabilities. Crowley's body was like that of an athlete, flexible and toned. A normal person might be near death after two and half days of unproductive labor. Crowley was holding himself upright in a low crouch. Natalie could see from his face that he was emotionally exhausted, but her hands told her that his body was in great shape, with hours of strength in it. It was an advantage she could use, and she needed every advantage she could get.

Inside his body, where scaly skin gave way to a surprisingly human shaped interior, there were serious problems. Despite the almost full dilation of the parent's cervix, the baby was stuck, tightly wedged into the bones of a too-small pelvic opening, getting crushed in more firmly with every contraction of their parent's powerful muscles. Worse still, the baby was breech. 

While Natalie's eyes and hands explored every detail of the body that was in front of her, her mind struggled to put together all the seeming contradictions. Two and a half days of obstructed labor, the flesh of the parent pinned between baby and unyielding bones. That kind of pressure cuts off circulation and crushes tissue and wears holes in the bladder and bowels. Natalie could feel how tightly the baby was wedged, and she could hear how much pain the parent was in, and she had no reason to doubt that the labor had been going on for two and a half days, but the flesh surrounding the obstruction was pink and healthy looking. 

Natalie measured her patient's bones with her hands. The internal anatomy of his soft tissues seemed perfectly normal and human, but there was something odd about the shape of his pelvis. Natalie probed with her fingers around the inside of the ring of bone, measuring the smallness of the opening. Then she ran her hands along the outside of his pelvis, pushing on the strange scaly skin, feeling the angles of the bones underneath, measuring with her fingers. The bones were similar in overall shape to a normal pelvis, but all the proportions were slightly distorted. 

Another contraction came and she stepped back to let her patient and his partner handle it in their way. She thought about what her hands had told her. She looked at the unusually high crest of the patient's hip bones. She thought about dragons and tried to remember if she knew what a lizards' pelvis should be shaped like. Then she realized that the answer was actually quite simple. Crowley's pelvis was shaped like that of a normal human male. She had been thinking of him as a transgender male, and she'd expected a wide low pelvis. Crowley had human female sexual organs with a human male bone structure. 

An atypical pelvis was a big problem. But it was a problem Natalie could keep in the back of her head. It might not matter at all if the baby didn't need to be delivered in one piece. She had deliberately put off this last bit of her examination. 

"All right Crowley," said Natalie. "A little more pressure on your belly." 

She put the stethoscope to Crowley's belly and started to move it around. After two silent minutes, she was sure. The visor hid her face from the parents, and gave her privacy to compose herself before she got to her feet. She gave them a neutral smile. There was no use telling them now. Another contraction was building; It would be painful enough. 

This time, instead of wrapping himself around the bedpost, Crowley threw both of his arms over his partner's shoulders. The two of them held each other and made the noises that helped them endure: Crowley moaning and shrieking and Aziraphale speaking loving nonsense phrases. For all that they were suffering, there was a peacefulness to the way that they clung together, the white haired occultist and the dragon man. There was fear and pain for both of them, but there was clearly something solid and loving between them that the pain couldn't touch.

Hopefully it would be enough to help them survive the emotional blow that was about to land. Natalie gave them their last moment of peace. She stepped back into the kitchen, took off her gloves, removed her visor and head torch, and stared out the kitchen window at the beautiful plants. 

There was no rush anymore. She tried to plan her words out, but, as had happened the other times when she'd had to deliver this news, her mind just froze. It should be easier, considering that the parents were an occultist and a sort of dragon, but Natalie had allowed them to become people to her, and so it hurt her heart just as much as it normally would.

The contraction passed, and Natalie stepped into the doorway. She composed her face. She said the words.

"I'm so sorry. There's no heartbeat. The baby is gone."

"No," said Crowley. "That can't be. There has to be s-something you can do. Do whatever you have to do to s-save the baby. Cut them out of me. I can take it. Aziraphale. Tell her." 

The white haired man was shaking his head incredulously. "But they're alive. The baby. I can feel them. I've been checking." He stood right in front of Natalie, crowding into her space. 

"Surely there must still be a way to get them out safely," said Aziraphale. "Tell us. Whatever it is, we'll help you do it."

"It's too late," said Natalie.

"It'sss NOT too late," said Crowley. His fangs were bared and he loomed over her like a gargoyle. 

Natalie stood her ground. "I can check again for you," she said. "But when there's no heartbeat, there's really nothing that can be done. I'm so sorry."

"Heartbeat?" Aziraphale gave an incongruous little laugh. He sounded relieved. "Oh," he said. "I'd forgotten." He took the end of her stethoscope and placed it on his own chest, right on his solar plexus. "We don't always have heartbeats. See?"

Natalie moved her stethoscope to the correct position on Aziraphale's chest, and listened to the silence. Her eyes widened. She felt her own heart start to pound faster and faster. He wasn't human. They were both really really really not human. They had no hearts. They had fangs and wings and scales and telepathic mind control and bodies that were much more durable than human bodies. 

And they had a live baby who needed to come into the world.

While the inhuman parents stared at her, Natalie cast her mind around to every birth she had ever seen to try to find some way to handle this bizarre situation. Finally she found the one. Twenty-six years ago. A tiny house in a remote village in Nigeria. A young teenager, small pelvis. No chance to get to a hospital. No anesthesia, just relatives to hold the girl down. A desperate barbaric sort of surgery, but it had worked, and the girl and baby had both survived. The girl had even walked again. Eventually. 

The wings were a huge problem. How to arrange a person with wings the size of the whole room so that she could perform the surgery and deliver the baby? Not on his back, surely. Every time he had a contraction, he thrashed his wings. Maybe they could be tied to his body. Could she even find a way to safely restrain such a strong bodied creature with what materials she had on hand? Natalie turned the problem around in her mind again and again. Inadequate pelvis, breech birth, great big wings. Damned huge wings. Then Natalie realized she might have another problem. 

"The baby," she said. "Will they be normal human shaped? Will they have wings like his?" 

"Wings," said Aziraphale. "There are definitely wings."

"How big are the wings going to be?", said Natalie.

"Um," said Aziraphale. He looked uncertainly at Crowley, who was starting to pant and whine.

"Just get her the picture," said Crowley. "Go!"

Aziraphale slipped past Natalie and into the kitchen. He returned a moment later, thrust a grainy ultrasound picture into her hand, and rushed past her to hold his partner. 

As Crowley howled his way through his contraction. Natalie studied the picture. It showed a baby with wing bones sticking out of their back. The wing bones looked to be as long as the leg bones and thinner and more fragile than the arm bones. She looked up from the picture and studied the way Crowley's wings moved-- flapping as the contraction built, and clenching tightly to his back as the pain hit its peak. She could deliver delicate baby wings, she just had to be careful not to bend them in the wrong ways.

Natalie thought about the surgery she'd participated in in Nigeria. A human would need to be on their back, with their legs held in a particular way so that their body wouldn't be damaged beyond repair. If the right positioning was maintained at all times there was a decent chance of full recovery. And it was better than death and better than fistulas-- those holes in the bowels and bladder that came from the very kind of obstructed labor that Crowley had been suffering through. If Crowley were human, he'd have holes in his organs and be near death. But Crowley had no tissue damage at all. 

Natalie watched as the contraction ended and the white haired magician creature put his hands on his partner's scaly belly. She had initially thought that Aziraphale was comforting Crowley, but now that she looked more carefully, she realized that something else was happening. He was holding his hands right over the spot where the baby was stuck, and he was closing his eyes as if he were concentrating on something. His fingers were twitching a little bit, just as they had when he was messing with Natalie's mind. He was doing magic. Natalie was sure of it. Aziraphale was the reason that Crowley and the baby were still alive after two and a half days. 

That was what decided her. What she had in mind would be an abysmally stupid thing to try with a human and their human partner. But Crowley wasn't a human. He was inhumanly strong. And his partner could heal him with magic. 

Natalie walked over to the charming little reading area in the corner of the bedroom. She picked up the ottoman and carried it over and set it down next to the bed. 

"Here's what we are going to do," said Natalie. She wasn't sure how, but her voice sounded calm and confident and even cheerful. "Aziraphale is going to sit on this stool like this with his legs spread wide. Crowley, you are going to sit on his knees, facing him, with your feet on the floor. Your wings are up and out of the way. Your legs are wide. You hang off of Aziraphale's neck and he supports the rest of your body weight with his hands on your bottom. He can lean back against the bed a little for comfort. I'll be underneath and behind you to catch the baby. That's the position."

"Right," said Aziraphale. "That's easy enough to do. Can you help me get him off the bed?"

But Crowley furrowed his brow. He held onto his bedpost and swayed as he crouched. His voice was low and raspy and he lisped when he spoke. "And what's the ressst? What happensss after we get into that possition?"

Of course he could read minds. She should have known. 

"Well Crowley," said Natalie, "Then I cut your pelvic bone open."


	4. Last Chance To Get Off This Train

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natalie negotiates with an angry dragon and then does some badass MacGyver stuff while teaching a crash course in anatomy to mind reading aliens.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gruesome and realistic medical horror ahead. Do not read if you are pregnant or plan to be pregnant.

"You want to cut my bonesss?", said the dragon man. 

His eyes were hidden by the sunglasses, but his body language was unmistakable. His wings were fluttering spasmodically the way they had when she'd touched him earlier. He was holding the bedpost with both hands and swaying from side to side. 

"You wouldn't ssssuggest sssuch a thing if I were a human, would you? Tell me. What would you do if I were a human? Don't even try to desss-ceive me." He bared his fangs at her.

Natalie was definitely afraid, but at least she knew she wasn't the only one. Crowley's swaying was a classic self-soothing behavior that she had seen before. And Natalie had a strong feeling that, as with humans, Crowley's lisp got worse when he was nervous. Fangs were definitely something she had not seen before in a medical setting. But at least she was aware that animals who are afraid will bite and kick their handlers. Natalie wasn't sure what gravid dragons did when they were afraid, but she damn well knew to take several steps backwards and to spread her hands to show that they were empty.

"Very sorry," said Aziraphale. He slipped one arm around his partner's back and rested his other hand on his belly. "We just need a moment to get used to the idea. I'm sure it's quite clever."

There was silence. Crowley's swaying slowed, but he didn't lean into his partner. He seemed to be concentrating on looking very closely at Natalie. He tilted his head back and forth as he examined her face. He looked like he was trying to absorb her through his glasses.

"If you were a human," said Natalie, "I'd already have loaded you into an ambulance, and you'd be on your way to a hospital for a Cesarean."

"With anesthessssia." 

It was interesting that having one's mind read didn't really feel like anything. Natalie had no real way to tell when he was doing it or to figure out how to defend against it. All she could do was be honest and hope that the dragon man could tell that she was being honest. 

"Can you go to a hospital?", asked Natalie.

"Of coursssse not!", said Crowley. 

"Well," said Natalie, "This is the safest option I can offer you with the resources that I have within this house."

The dragon man leaned forward. He was probably trying to loom over her, but she was on the other side of the room, he clearly needed his bedpost for support, and his partner was hugging him, so the looming didn't work very well. The fangs, however, were still rather intimidating. He bared them and snarled as he spoke. 

"Do you think I don't feel pain?"

"I think that you've been in extraordinary pain for two and a half days," said Natalie. "And you've endured it, and here you are still as healthy as can be. You are incredibly strong. I am guessing that you could continue for days. The question is, how long can the baby do this? Unfortunately, I can't answer that question for you." 

Crowley growled and turned his face away from her. His wings fluttered. 

Aziraphale whispered something into Crowley's ear. Crowley answered with a rumbling noise. 

"If we open up your pelvis," said Natalie, "The baby could be out of your body within the hour. The birth would be extremely painful but, once the baby is born, you could start to recover. I would think that you could heal much faster than a human would."

The dragon man leaned forward again and stared at her through the sunglasses. His brows furrowed. Natalie decided that the sunglasses made the mind reading thing even worse. 

"Humanssss don't alwayssss recover," said the dragon man, "What elsssse aren't you telling me?"

"You aren't human; the normal rules don't all apply to you," said Natalie, "But this rule does: I do not act against my patients' wishes. If you want me to leave, I will leave right now." A very small part of her hoped that he would ask her to leave. But he said nothing. It looked like he wanted her to stay.

Crowley covered his fangs with his lips. Aziraphale rubbed circles on his belly and peered at his eyes through the sides of his sunglasses. Natalie wished she could see those eyes. It would level the playing field a bit. She wasn't sure how much time she could afford to waste on negotiating. She had no way to assess how robust the baby was. The only people who could assess the baby were the dragon man himself and his magical partner. And the disheveled magician had so little sense that it took him two days to recognize that he needed to get help. 

But he had gotten help in the end. She turned to Aziraphale and pled her case.

"Earlier, Crowley said that he thinks the baby is in danger. This is the fastest way to deliver baby that I can safely offer with my current resources. There is still a possibility of seriously injuring Crowley. But you are both very strong, and I think you can both handle doing the difficult things that we would need to do to keep Crowley's body safe and deliver the baby fast."

The entire time she was speaking to him, Aziraphale was staring at his partner's eyes, his nose pressed up against the side of Crowley's sunglasses, his face very still. His lips were a tight line, and the only sign he gave that he heard her was that he was blinking very rapidly. Crowley was worrying his lower lip with his teeth. The muscles around his eyes were moving. His wings had gone still. 

Natalie checked her watch. She had about a half a minute before she'd lose them both to a contraction. 

"If it is truly important for us to go fast," said Natalie, "Then I don't want to spend any more time arguing. You both will need to trust me. I won't lie to you, but I will feed you information in a particular order, to make it easier for you to do this right." 

Aziraphale whispered something else to Crowley. Crowley made a small noise and turned his head and buried his face into his partner's shoulder. 

"Can you be ready to start working with me as soon as this contraction ends?"

Crowley raised his head. His sunglasses were askew. His eyes were shiny and he squinted in the light. "Yesss," he said. 

Natalie exhaled. "I'll get my things," she said. She had to pass by them both to get to the doorway. When she was less than a step away from him, Crowley hissed in her ear. 

"Wassssn't hissss fault," Crowley said. "Don't be angry at Ziraphale." He started to pant. "Not hissss fault." Another pant. "He wanted to get help sssooner." He bared his fangs and grunted. "It wasss me." A grunt. And then a whimper. "Thought I could-- Whew-- Fuuuuuuuu--". His curse turned into an inarticulate scream. 

\------------------------------------------------------------------

A minute and a half later, Natalie was standing in front her patient with a syringe and a marker in her left hand. She had a vial of medicine warming under her left arm. She had a cup of water and a handful of ibuprofen in her right hand. She was keeping an eye on her watch. She was very aware that she had less than three minutes between the end of this contraction and the beginning of the next one. And she had to make sure to give the patient the illusion of not being rushed, because she needed to keep his anxiety as low as possible. Low anxiety was one of the few good tools she had to reduce his pain. The other was the local anesthetic that she was warming for him. She hoped that lidocaine worked on dragon people. 

When her patient raised his head from his partner's shoulder, the sunglasses were gone. They had fallen onto the bed. Natalie handed Aziraphale the ibuprofen and the water and started talking. She used short clear phrases because Crowley had trouble taking information in just after a contraction. After Crowley answered her, she double checked his answers with Aziraphale. Then she kneeled in front of him, marked his skin where she'd need to cut, and started injecting the region with the local anesthetic. 

Natalie needed to make a bit of a compromise between speed and painfulness when she injected the anesthetic. She used the pauses between injections to start developing a vocabulary with her patient. "That injection was about a 5 or 6 on a 1 to 10 scale of pain," she explained. "The pain during your contractions probably ranges between a 6 to a 9. Does that make sense?"

"And ten is where I passss out?," said Crowley. 

"Yes. Ten is the maximum before you lose consciousness. And 1 is barely noticeable pain. Do you think you can use a 1 to 10 scale to tell me how you feel right at this moment?"

"Yep. Three." That was his baseline. That was how it felt to have the baby crushing his organs. Aziraphale must be lessening his pain. Crowley always seemed calmer when his partner was touching him. 

"How bout now?" She carefully slipped the needle into a spot that should already be starting to get numb.

"Four. That one didn't hurt asss much asss the first one."

"Good," said Natalie. She checked her watch. "Here comes the next injection."

Crowley made a wordless hiss. Then: "Five," he said. 

Natalie had to speed up the injections as the contraction approached, but as she stepped away, she was sure that she had accomplished both of her missions. She had numbed as large and deep a region as she could and she had established communication with her patient. During the next contraction, as he clung to his partner and howled his way through the pain, Crowley continued to communicate with her. Half of the words he screamed were curses, and the other half were numbers. 

Natalie needed to work fast, so she organized her time into tiny little blocks. The slightly less than three minute intervals between contractions were for preparing the patient and his partner. The 80 to 90 seconds of contraction time were for organizing supplies and trying to anticipate and plan for every contingency. 

In her first 80 second organizing/planing period, Natalie brought her medical bags over to the ottoman and set out her supplies. Fortunately, this was a very simple surgery. She set out gloves, a scalpel, a catheter, gauze and dressings, and medical tape. She hung the IV bag from the frame of the bed. 

While she set out supplies, Natalie thought very carefully about everything she might possibly have to do during the delivery. From the moment she cut into her patient to the moment she had the baby in their cot and the parent in traction, there would be constant danger. She couldn't afford any mistakes. Breech births were always a bit of a three dimensional puzzle with all the rotations and special support required to guide the baby out. But this breech birth was extra complicated. Baby had wings, and the parent's opened and unstable pelvis was not going to be supported in the time tested way. A small mistake could mean broken bones for baby or parent. A big mistake could mean permanent disability or death. 

Or at least it would for humans. Aziraphale could heal Crowley and the baby with magic. That's why this plan wasn't a stupid idea. Natalie just hoped to minimize the amount of magic that would be needed. 

Natalie visualized every possible configuration of the two bodies that she was going to need to separate from each other. The little one, whose legs might be in any of several positions, whose delicate wings might or might not get caught as they twisted their way through the oddly shaped bones of their parent and whose perfectly ordinary arms and head could likewise move into an unfortunate configuration. The parent, whose bones would be forced apart by the baby's body. How far apart would be safe to allow? What other movements might the bones make under so many pressures? She made her best guesses, and planned to rely on the magical powers of the occultist father to control the pelvic instability. 

Crowley's shouts brought Natalie out of her reverie.

"Sssixss," he said, and then "Five." 

His pain was diminishing. Natalie's time was up. She would have no more time to think about the delivery itself. Her next problem was to work out a way to quickly get the parent into traction after the baby was delivered. That would be the subject of her next 80 seconds of planning time. For the next three minutes she needed to concentrate on the education of the patient and his partner.

"Aziraphale," said Natalie. "Can you please bring that stuffed duck toy over here?" She pointed to the low dresser on the far side of the bed. There was no way Natalie was going to try to squeeze her way past Crowley's wings to get to the side of the room that was behind him. Natalie had ridden horses exactly twice, and the only useful thing she'd learned, other than that she definitely hated horses, was that you should never put yourself directly behind something strong and skittish. 

When Aziraphale brought the duck back, Natalie set it onto the bed next to Crowley and she took Aziraphale's hands. 

"This ring of bone," she said, placing Aziraphale's hands on his partner's hips, "Is Crowley's pelvis. It goes all the way from his spine in the back, to his hips, to the front where there is this little mound of bone. Can you feel the ring of his pelvis?"

Aziraphale slowly traced his fingers around his partner from back to front. 

"The pelvis is shaped a bit like a doughnut," said Natalie. "It's a sort of circle with a hole in the middle." Aziraphale nodded enthusiastically. Even time traveling aliens must enjoy doughnuts. 

"Now lets make our hands like a pelvis." Natalie made an "O" shape with her hands, touching the thumbs and fingers together to make a circle. She turned her "O" horizontally and Aziraphale did the same. 

Natalie picked up the duck. "This is the baby." She stuck its rear end into the "O" shape of Aziraphale's hands. It fit perfectly. Three centimeters of its tail end protruded from the bottom of the circle. Its little orange bill pointed up at the ceiling. "The baby is stuck in the hole in the middle of the ring of bone." 

Aziraphale's jaw dropped open. He nearly dropped the duck. "Oh!", he said, "That does explains it! My poor darlings." Natalie repositioned his hands and the duck.

"The thing you need to understand," said Natalie, "Is that the pelvis isn't bone all the way around." She pointed at the part of Crowley's body that would have pubic hair if he weren't covered in scales. This was the region that she had numbed with the lidocaine. "Right here, in the middle of this little mound in the front, it is actually not bone at all. There's a thin section that's just made of soft cartilage."

Natalie kept her voice, and her thoughts, hearty and cheerful. If these creatures were anything like humans, then as soon as they got scared, they'd stop being able to take in new information. And she needed them to understand as much information as possible because they were going to need to be active participants.

"Lucky for us, the soft cartilage is not far below the skin. We can cut through it from the outside, and then the halves of the pelvis separate a bit," She pulled Aziraphale's fingers slightly apart to make a "C" shape. The little duck slipped down. "Now the opening is big enough for the baby to pass through."

Aziraphale nodded. Crowley turned his face to Natalie. He narrowed his eyes. 

"The wings are caught," said Crowley. It was true. Most of the little stuffed duck had fallen through but it was hanging by its wings from Aziraphale's hands. Damned smart dragon man. He had zeroed in on the thing that was second most worrying to Natalie. 

"Making sure the wings don't get caught is my job," said Natalie. "I need you two to focus on your job."

She made the ring with her own hands again. "A circle shape is very stable and strong." She opened her hands to make the "C" shape. "But this open shape is not as stable. The two sides can start to twist and rotate independently of each other, or they can open too far."

And now Natalie had to work hard to keep her cheerful tone. "So Crowley's job is going to be to hold up as much of his own body weight as he can, hanging off of Aziraphale's neck and shoulders. The less pressure on the pelvis, the less twisting. And Aziraphale, your hands are going to be bracing Crowley's pelvis and holding it steady as he sits on your knees."

"What happens if it twists?" said Crowley. 

He was starting to pant again, but his face didn't leave hers. Natalie was torn. She didn't want to frighten Aziraphale. She still needed to get through the rest of the instructions and if he got frightened at this stage, he might not be able to absorb the information that he needed to do his job. But Crowley would get anxious if he thought she was trying to lie to him. Natalie was starting to get dizzy from the effort of managing the emotions of these two otherworldly creatures. 

She decided that Crowley was probably reading her mind, so he already knew the answer to his question. Bones could break and organs, even dragon man organs, were not infinitely flexible, and they too could tear. She could see the slit pupils of his eyes widen as she thought about the potential complications, and she stared him down as she spoke the aloud portion of her answer. 

"Bad things," said Natalie, "But your bones won't twist because Aziraphale won't let that happen." 

"Your bones won't twist," said Aziraphale. "I would never allow such a thing." And the occultist put his hands on his partner's belly and started surreptitiously healing the damage that the rising contraction was starting to cause. He closed his blue eyes, probably to help him concentrate. 

Apparently the occultist wasn't able to read her mind at the same time as he healed his partner. Natalie wasn't even sure if the occultist realized how much she understood about his powers. Even if he did know that she knew, it was best not to draw attention to the subject. Natalie had just allowed Aziraphale the opportunity to subtly confirm that he was capable of doing what she thought he could do. Hopefully, he'd not feel the need to erase her mind after the baby was born. 

Natalie allowed herself a tiny self-congratulatory moment. She'd read the situation right. She could count on Aziraphale to support Crowley. He would hold his partner steady in any position she told him to, with physical and magical strength. She watched how easily he supported the dragon man who was now writhing and half-leaning into him. She had a guess that Aziraphale might be exactly as physically strong as Crowley. "We don't always have heartbeats," is what he'd said. "We." What exactly were these creatures? 

Natalie checked her watch. She'd just spent eight seconds on speculative thoughts. She had 72 seconds left in this planning period, and she still needed to figure out how to get her patient into traction after the birth. 

"Where do you keep the towels and sheets?", asked Natalie. 

Aziraphale managed to make himself heard over his partner's vocalizations, and he directed Natalie to a closet in the hall. Natalie opened the narrow door, grabbed every single towel and stacked them in her arms. She thought through her plan for after the birth. She would need to get her patient's hips into traction and transfer him to the bed where he could lie flat. Her eye fell on the neatly stacked bed sheets, and her plan crystallized. She remembered a story her brother had told her about stabilizing a patient in the field during his time as an army medic. She grabbed the sheets. Then she cast an appraising eye at the narrow closet door. Those old Victorian doors were sturdy. 

During the next rest period between contractions, they got Crowley off the bed and onto Aziraphale's knees. Natalie was very pleased to discover that she had been right about Aziraphale. Even though he might look like a fussy and soft little human man, Aziraphale was actually just as strong as Crowley. He practically carried his partner from the bed to the floor all by himself, and he got Crowley settled, facing him, and balanced on his knees in plenty of time for Natalie to do some rehearsals with them both. 

Aziraphale was pretty obviously not a fast thinker, and Natalie used her remaining minute and a half to show him all of the different ways she might need to call on him to support his partner. She made him demonstrate each position at least once. As Crowley started panting, she started on her next task. 

"Where do you keep tools?", said Natalie.

"Four," said Crowley. "What toolsss? Five."

"I need a screw driver and a mallet or hammer," said Natalie.

"Oh dear," said Aziraphale, "We don't usually do repairs, per se. Perhaps--"

"Kitchen," said Crowley, between grunts, "Ussse whatever you can-- ugh-- find. Sssix. Get--ugh-- creative."

While Crowley howled, Natalie rummaged in the kitchen. She found a sturdy iron poker propped between the wood box and the stove. It had a nice flat tapered edge on one side. She found a small iron frypan hanging on the wall. She carried them back to the linen closet, set the flat edge of the poker into the hinge of door, swung the pan at the other end of the poker, and hammered the door off its hinges. She came back into the bedroom and laid the poker and the narrow door on the floor. She had taken more than 90 seconds, and Crowley had already come down from the contraction. 

It was just as well. She needed him to be fully cogent for this next conversation. She picked up a sheet, measured it with her forearm, nicked it with a razor blade, and started tearing it into strips. Aziraphale flinched at the sound of the fabric ripping apart. 

She spoke briskly while she tore strips of two different widths. 

"If you choose to do this," she said, "My best guess is that we will have the baby delivered within about twenty to thirty minutes. But I need you both to understand that it may be extremely painful, probably more so than the contractions Crowley has been experiencing, and the pain may not ease much between contractions. It is likely to be 8 to 10 all the way. It's going to be Hell."

Crowley snorted as if he was laughing at a private joke.

"Now," she said "Crowley. There are going to be a lot of odd sensations. You may feel like your body is unstable or like you are falling apart. You'll feel the baby moving down. If you feel something strange, you tell me, but you Do Not Move. No matter what you feel, you can not move. You hold onto Aziraphale. You hold yourself up. You do not let go."

"Got it," he said. "Hold on no matter what." He leaned forward and wrapped his arms behind Aziraphale's neck as a demonstration. 

Natalie threaded a strip of sheet around Crowley's arms. "Belt and suspenders," she said. 

He grunted as she tied his arms in place. 

"No matter how painful it gets, I need you to try to stay conscious and support your body weight on your arms. That's critical. If your body sags, we may be in trouble." 

She was asking him to do something that would be impossible for a human. This was his opportunity to confirm that he could do what she thought he could. 

Crowley pressed his lips together. His wings fluttered again. 

"You'll stay conscious," said Aziraphale. "I'll help you." Then he looked at Natalie. "He can do it."

Crowley nodded. "Yeah," he said. "I can do it." 

"After the baby comes, I don't want either of you to be tempted to look down to try catch a peek. I will bring baby up to you. Your jobs won't be done just because baby is out. You do not move until I move you. Understand?"

"Yes," said Aziraphale. 

"Now, I'm going to wash my hands. After the next contraction, I'm going to place the catheter and the IV. Then we'll go through one last contraction. During that contraction, I'm going to lie on the floor and get into position. After the contraction, I'm going to ask Crowley to confirm that he wants to go forward. That will be your last chance to get off this train. Understand?"

"Yep," said Crowley. 

"Good. I'm going to wash my hands and glove up."

The sounds of the sink couldn't drown out Crowley's cries. But at least this was going to be one of the last times he was going to have unproductive labor pains. It helped her to think that way. After she did the surgery, the labor would be productive, and that was good. 

As she placed the IV and the catheter, Natalie told them all the worst that could happen. She told them how long Crowley's recovery would be if he were a human. She told them that she would do her absolute best for him, and that she would respect Crowley's decision no matter what it was. She finished her speech and her tasks with 25 seconds to spare, and she left the couple to have whatever conversation they could cram in before the rising contraction took away Crowley's ability to speak. She stepped out of the room to give them privacy. 

Natalie could hear their urgent whispers from around the corner, but she didn't even have to put effort into not eavesdroping. They were speaking in a language that sounded nothing like any language she'd ever heard. It probably wasn't even a human language. 

\------------------------------------------------------------------

Two minutes later Natalie was lying on her back on the floor between Aziraphale's legs with her head bent up against the ottoman and her patient above her. Natalie's uncle had been an auto mechanic, and he used to work under cars like this all the time, lying on a greasy old blanket with a portable torch next to his head and his tools on his belly. Natalie was lying on a towel with a stack of gauze and dressings on her belly. She had a head torch. Her hands were reaching up, the fingers of her left hand firmly gripping her patient while her right held the scalpel poised over the scaly skin. 

She asked the question. She heard Crowley's hoarse, "Yesss." Then she started cutting.

Time seemed to slow down. She had never done this before. She had read about it, she'd seen it done, but she had never done it herself. 

Later, she would remember those first moments as little disjointed flashes of memory. She would remember her surprise that cutting through scales wasn't much tougher than cutting through human skin. How at first she didn't see the blood that was welling up because the red scales made it invisible. 

She would remember the sound of Crowley's delighted voice as he cried out "Three! Three! Four!" because the lidocaine had dulled the skin and the muscles and he couldn't feel the blade. The way the first drops of blood which dripped onto her chin and neck were so annoyingly ticklish as they rolled down to the floor. 

She would remember when her left hand almost slipped, and how frightened she was because that hand was the guide that was preventing her from accidentally cutting at least two essential body parts. Once she gotten past the big black mark on the patient's skin, she was practically cutting by feel. She had trouble seeing what she was doing because she had only two hands and there was no one to siphon the pooling blood away. She went as slowly as she dared. 

She felt the change in the resistance to her blade when she reached cartilage. Crowley was still calling out "Four, Four, Five", sounding smug, like he'd won some sort of contest. There was wetness from the blood pooling in the hollow of her neck. She could feel the layers of cartilage, which had no nerves, giving way under her scalpel. 

"Four, Five, Four, Five." He had sounded like a child chanting a silly song. 

At that moment she'd almost froze. She had fifteen seconds till the next contraction, and she hadn't been sure if she'd cut deep enough, but she was too afraid to cut all the way through the cartilage for fear of damaging the organs that the pelvis was supposed to protect. 

The next moments would be indelibly etched into her memory. Hearing the seconds tick on her watch and the sound of her own blood pounding in her ears and the sing-song chanting of the dragon man. "Five, Five, Five." Daring to make just one more light pass with the blade and then feeling the tiny vibration under her hands of the tearing of the thin layer of cartilage as it gave way under the pressure of the baby above, how Crowley's voice stuttered "Sss ven," as the bones started to separate. And then how he screamed. 


	5. The Only Way Out is Through

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A healthy angel is born, but the birth leaves everyone else a little bit broken.

It felt a bit like being in a cave. The dark canopy of the dragon man's wings blocked off any light that didn't come from Natalie's head torch. Natalie had expected there to be a lot of flapping and wind, but there hadn't been. When the first contraction started to split his body open, the dragon man's wings had both dropped into a strange stiff position with their ends resting on the floor. And so now Natalie was in a tiny dark cave made of feathers. 

At the center of Natalie's dark chamber was redness. Red scaly belly with a red gash. Her red hands were on either side of the wound that she had just created. During the contraction, she had felt the bones under her hands being driven apart like tectonic plates by the power of her patient's body. With the roar of his screams, it had been like being in a magma chamber when a volcano was exploding. 

Now was the period of relative calm between tectonic shifts. Only the three of them, the dragon man, his partner, and Natalie, even seemed to exist. There was a hole in the roof of the dark little cave, and through that hole Natalie could see the dragon man's pale chest and the underside of his arms. Aziraphale's legs in his pale trousers were like two sturdy stalagmites. Natalie could see the magician's hands and arms around the body of the dragon man. 

Now that the first contraction had passed, the canopy of wings made everything seem strangely still. They absorbed some of the sounds, so there was no echo. The patient's cries hadn't stopped when the contraction did, they had just changed into ragged desperate breathy cries. They had a strange quality of studio sound purity. Natalie could hear the little whistles of the air catching in his throat when he inhaled. 

"Slow breaths, Crowley," said Natalie. "Keep taking breaths, Crowley" said Natalie, "Nice good deep breaths, as deep as you comfortably can." She couldn't afford for him to lose consciousness and she'd left her oxygen tank behind when she was kidnapped. All she had to offer was a calm and reassuring voice, and so that's what she did.

Natalie was on her back on a towel. The towel could slide along the floor to make it easier for her to use her legs to pull herself over to see what was happening inside her patient and then push herself back towards the ottoman to tend to the wound that she had just created. She slid forward and peered inside of her patient. 

"It's working," Natalie said. She measured with her fingers. "Baby has shifted down almost two centimeters already. Your body is very strong, Crowley. Very strong. Just keep breathing. We are on our way. Aziraphale, keep that counter pressure on his hips, and help him to slow his breathing." 

She heard Aziraphale's voice. It had a sing-song soothing quality to it, but she couldn't make out any word except "Crowley." He must be speaking the alien language. 

She heard her patient's ragged breaths get deeper. The inhalations were quieter and less strained. She waited until he had caught his breath.

"Crowley," said Natalie, "Check in with me. Give me a number." All she got in reply were strange broken sounds and sobs. 

"I think that must be around an eight or a nine," said Aziraphale, "Sorry." 

Natalie ran her hands around Crowley's pelvic girdle, trying to figure out if there was already a fracture or if all the pain was just from the stress on the bones. There could be all manner of soft tissue damage. The patient couldn't talk enough to say where it hurt, so it was impossible to know. She checked her watch. The next contraction was about to begin. 

Time seemed to stop as the volcano rumbled again. 

Inside her patient's body, the baby shifted downward. It was happening fast enough that she could see the motion. The parent's body was pushing the baby downward and thereby driving its own bones apart with its powerful contractions. Natalie had unleashed that power and it wasn't going to be possible for her to control it. She'd be lucky to steer a little bit. 

"Aziraphale!", she shouted, "Position two! Counterpressure!" She could barely hear her own voice over the roar of her patient. It was like being in a helicopter. The occultist put his hands on the outside of the patient's hips and the spreading of the bones seemed to slow. Or maybe it was her imagination. There was no way to be sure. Going a little slower might prevent all manner of tearing. Or it might uselessly increase the danger to the baby. There was no way to be sure about those things either. 

After the second contraction, the external wound was gaping. The bleeding wasn't too bad. Hopefully no serious internal injuries. Natalie covered the wound with a sterile dressing. It was a bit silly, but she did consider whether to apply the medical tape parallel to or orthogonal to the scales. She didn't want to rip the scales if she had to remove the tape later. Not that her patient would even feel it. His pain was too intense for him to notice such small things. He was wailing between hitching breaths.

"Aziraphale," said Natalie, "Help him to keep breathing. We are doing just fine. We are just going to keep breathing together."

Aziraphale said some things in the strange language. He repeated himself several times. 

The breaths got slightly slower and the wails changed quality. There sounded like there could be words in the wails, but if there were, they weren't in English. 

"He says his legs have gone numb," said Aziraphale, "He can't feel them at all. Is that normal?"

Natalie didn't know. She wanted to say that it was okay, but she didn't know. They were in the woods. She just knew that the only way out was through. 

"There are going to be a lot of strange sensations," said Natalie. 

Crowley wailed and made some more sounds that could be words. 

"He says his back hurts," said Aziraphale. "We seem to be at around a nine or ten on your scale, but I'm able to help him a bit with the pain." The occultist was no longer bothering with pretending not to have magic powers.

"He's doing really well," said Natalie, "Keep breathing, Crowley. Baby will be with with us soon." She was threading a strip of the sheet over Aziraphale's hands and around Crowley's hips to use to bind him back together when it was over. "Keep holding him, Aziraphale. Nice deep breaths, Crowley."

The ragged breaths and wails continued. It was insane. She had done this to him and now there was no stopping till the end. Hopefully it wouldn't be too much longer till the end. Hopefully the baby would survive. No way to know how baby was doing under the stress. No way to make decisions about whether to let the bones spread faster or slower. The cervix was ready. At this rate, everything might be over in only ten or fifteen minutes. But Crowley didn't sound like he'd make it through ten or fifteen minutes. His breathing was too shallow. He was making too many noises and not inhaling enough. Aziraphale had gone silent. And Natalie herself was in danger of panicking, and that would not do at all. 

"What were you thinking for names?", said Natalie. 

"Er," said Aziraphale. 

"For the baby," said Natalie. "What do you want to name the baby?" 

"Oh," said Aziraphale. He took a deep breath and then he followed her lead. "That has been quite a debate." Crowley's wails quieted a bit. He was listening. 

"I can imagine," said Natalie. "What names are you considering?"

"I like Iman," said Azirapale. He made a few soothing sounds in the other language. "It's unisex, and Crowley can pronounce it even when he's angry."

Crowley made a mildly unhappy noise that stood out from the rest of his whimpers. He took a deeper than usual breath. 

"What's your favorite baby name, Crowley?", said Natalie. 

Crowley made a small whimper and took another breath. 

"Miran," said Aziraphale, "That's one of his favorites right now, right darling?"

"Unh," said Crowley. 

"Good," said Natalie, "Good, Crowley. Good breathing. Very good. Miran is a lovely name, I've not heard it before. What does it mean?" 

A half minute later the rising contraction swept the conversation away. They got through the waiting after the third contraction by pretending to debate the merits of five other baby names while Natalie mentally debated whether wings or legs would need to be managed first.

When the fourth contraction started, things started to happen very quickly. There was no point in trying to engage the laboring parent to tell him to either push or not. He was completely insensible with pain. His body was doing what it was going to do, and Natalie could barely keep up. All of her concentration was on making sure that baby wouldn't get entrapped in the maze of oddly shaped bones. She was going on instinct, because she couldn't use the regular pattern to guide baby out. She was sitting on her feet behind the patient, her shins and knees on a damp towel. The cone of light told her eyes what to focus on, and her hands told her whatever her eyes could not. 

The baby was sitting crosslegged. Natalie tried her normal trick for freeing a leg, but the pelvic opening was so deep that it took her three tries to get the first leg out. She could feel part way up the baby's lower back, but there were no wings at all. They must be up high, above the ring of bone. She wanted to deliver the wings laying flat along the back. If they got twisted and caught above the shoulders, she might not be able to figure out how to untangle them without breaking them. She slid her fingers up along the baby's back and found something thin and soft and scissored it between two fingers. The wing had a soft texture, and it was easy to grip. She pulled gently, and the first wing tip slid down past the ring of bone. She explored with her fingers, made a best guess, prayed she wasn't wrong, and found the second wing tip and carefully pulled it down. Then she felt herself exhale in relief. She'd managed not to cross the wings over each other. They were lying parallel to each other along the back and they reached all the way to baby's buttocks. Now she could unfold the second leg. 

Natalie could feel Crowley's bones shift in unnatural ways as she worked. The sound of his groans filled her ears, and she was terrified of what she was doing to him, but she needed all of her concentration for freeing the baby. It was Aziraphale's job to keep the pelvis stable, and hers to get the baby out. And there was magical healing available. It had to be enough. 

She felt the pressure rising again, and she wrapped a small towel around baby's middle to give her a grip as she guided a perfectly normal arm and shoulder out of a deep tunnel of bones. But then she had to figure out how to extract the tops of both wings before she could free the other arm and shoulder. At this point, every move Natalie made tore fresh sounds of agony from the patient. The sounds were no longer high screams but deep moans that sounded like there was barely any consciousness attached to the pain. She feared that she was damaging him, but there was only the head left, and Crowley's body wasn't giving her any time to pause. She gripped the towel-wrapped body one handed while she reached in to position the baby's face and head for safe delivery. The force pushing on the head was incredible, and she protected the tiny head as best she could, supporting and rotating the baby until something gave way and she pulled the baby free. 

She fell backwards a little. She was sitting on her heels with a canopy of black wings overhead and her arms full of baby. The baby had giant wet wings as long as their back and the wings were already moving. Natalie used the towel to improve her grip and she used a corner of it to wipe the little face. 

"Are they all right?" It was Aziraphale. 

The baby answered the question with a vigorous cry. They brayed and beat at the air with their fists and thrashed their wings and legs, freeing themself from the towel and threatening to upset themself out of Natalie's arms. 

"They" was indeed the correct pronoun. Natalie was having a bit of trouble figuring out how to safely hold a six-limbed baby, but now that she looked carefully, the wings weren't the only odd thing about the baby. Before the birth, she had been just following the parents' lead with the baby's pronoun, but, there was no doubt now that the parents had been correct. Between the vigorously kicking legs was a genital configuration that Natalie had seen only once before. 

"Congratulations," she said, adjusting her grip again so that the child was pinned between her forearms and her belly. "You have a healthy intersex child."

Natalie checked the time on her watch. 12:48pm. It was an automatic thing to do. A ridiculous thing. There wouldn't be a birth registration form filed for this baby. Still, Natalie took a tiny bit of pride in the fact that she had agreed to take on this high complexity crisis birth at 11:52, and she'd gone from evaluation to delivery in less than an hour. 

Once she found a way to grip the child between her legs, her hands managed to clamp and cut the cord without much trouble. She tried to wrap the baby in a clean towel, but the wings wouldn't stop moving so she gave up and draped the baby, belly-down, over her forearm, and brought them up to where the parents could see. Aziraphale was still holding on to his partner with all his might. He looked like he had aged two decades in the last twenty minutes but his eyes brightened when he saw the flapping, grizzling baby.

"The baby, Crowley!", said Aziraphale. "The baby is beautiful. They have plump cheeks and grey eyes and the most perfect wings. The down is still wet, so I can't tell the color, but their wings might be dark like yours. Crowley, we have a child!"

Crowley's head was lolling on Aziraphale's collar bone. He didn't seem able to lift his head, but the quality of his pained sounds changed for a moment. Natalie brought the baby right next to his face, and a wing brushed across his cheek. His cheek twitched in a ghost of a smile. His eyes fluttered open for a second. They were almost completely black. "Angel," he muttered. Then he said something else that was too muddled to understand. 

"That's right, Crowley," said Natalie. One handed, Natalie adjusted the flow on the IV and pushed the plunger on the syringe that she'd set up earlier. "Your baby is a perfect angel. Wings and all." Aziraphale turned his head and managed to brush the baby's head with his lips while she worked. Then Natalie sped away with the baby.

She couldn't figure out how to swaddle wings, and she didn't have time to mess about, so she just set the baby down on their side. It wasn't a nice thing to do, and baby objected strenuously. But baby would be just fine. The room was comfortably warm. She wasn't worried about them. 

As she hurried back to her patient, Natalie could hear Crowley slurring in confusion. 

"Baby?", he said ". . . whereza . . . need to . . ."

"Baby is doing wonderfully," said Natalie. "You just keep holding on. We're just going to tidy you up a bit and get you into bed and then you can hold your little angel in your arms." This last statement was full of lies, but Natalie felt pretty safe about lying to Crowley at this point. Aziraphale, however, was very upset. 

"The baby," said Aziraphale, "Are they okay? They do seem terribly unhappy." 

Natalie pushed aside a pile of ruined towels and slid back under her patient and rested her head up against the ottoman between Aziraphale's legs. There was no time for her to try to look up how to repair cartilage. No time for anything fancy at all. She tugged on the ends of the bloody sheet that was wrapped around Crowley's pelvis, worked the sheet under Aziraphale's hands and tied a square knot at the front just to the side of the wound. Then she reached for the iron poker. 

"Baby is a little angry because they are lonely," said Natalie. "I'll take care of them after we get Crowley sorted." 

The poker was too long. She had planned to slide the poker under the knot and twist to winch the sheet tightly around her patient's hips, the way her brother had done when he made his improvised traction device, but she had miscalculated. The poker was too long to rotate in the constrained space she had. Aziraphale's arms and legs would be in the way. And Aziraphale couldn't move. Right now, he was the traction device holding Crowley together. 

"But shouldn't one of us--" said Aziraphale.

"All those loud cries from baby are a sign of health," said Natalie. She tried to keep the impatience out of her voice. "Keep a tight hold on Crowley's hips."

The contraction came at that moment, and Crowley's body jerked to life again. Natalie helped him to pass the placenta. As she pulled and tugged at his insides, he made a few low moans of complaint. Once she was sure that the bleeding was within normal limits, Natalie reconsidered the problem of the traction device. 

Careful not to slip on the slick floor, she got to her feet and ran to the kitchen. She found what she needed at once. There was a funny metal tool lying on the stovetop. She checked it over. It was the right length, about 30 centimeters. It had smooth sides. It had a strange springy handle on one side and a flat section with a bend on the end. She grabbed it.

As she rushed back into the room, Aziraphale caught her eye and jerked his head toward the cot where the baby was wailing. "Shouldn't we--", said Aziraphale. 

"Baby is perfectly fine," said Natalie. "We don't need to worry about the baby." 

Aziraphale's eyes widened. He finally understood. He blinked a few times. Then he took a deep breath and started talking to his mate. "Crowley, can you hear how strong our baby is?," he said, "They are tempestous like you are. You are both so strong willed. Hold on to me a little longer. You are so strong." 

Natalie slid into the cave of feathers, popped up between Aziraphale's legs, slipped some dressing between the wound and the knot and then slid the tool underneath knot of the bloody sheet around Crowley's hips. 

It was hard to move. Natalie's shoulders were crammed between Azirphale's legs and her arms had almost no room. She slowly twisted the stove tool to tighten the sheet around Crowley's hips. Her whole field of view was the blood soaked sheets, the belly and genitals of the patient, and a cage of arms and legs. She could tell that she was surrounded by the dome of black feathers by the way they softened all the sounds in the room. Crowley's low groans were the counterpoint to baby's high pitched shrieks of distress. 

When the waves of pained sounds threatened to drown her, Aziraphale's voice became Natalie's anchor. Aziraphale just kept on with his monologue. "Such a difficult day you've had, my darling. You are so brave. Just hold on. I'm right here, my love. Right here." 

Natalie secured the stove tool with some loops of sheet, and then slipped back underneath her patient. The postpartum hemorrhaging was less than she expected. Natalie was all but certain that Aziraphale was to thank for that. It was probably also due to the magician that the strength of the dragon man's arms hadn't yet given out. Magical strength might not last forever, though.  
  
The floor in the cave of feathers was slick with blood. There was a pile of ruined towels near Aziraphale's legs. Natalie quickly wiped the floor with yet another towel and then pushed as much of the mess as possible out of the way so that it would be safe to walk. She got to her feet. She took off her bloody gloves and then pulled the covers off the bed. She threw an absorbent pad onto the sheet of the bed. She grabbed a half dozen strips of sheet bandages and hung them around her neck. She picked the closet door up from the floor. Then she considered for a moment, and set it down again. She walked over to the reading nook, dragged the arm chair over, positioned it a meter behind her patient and then picked up the door. 

"This is our stretcher," she said.

She brought the door up behind Crowley and slipped it under him, between Aziraphale's legs, so that it bumped the top of the ottoman. She rested the top of the door on the cushion of the chair. She stood behind Crowley, straddled the door, and put her hands on top of Aziraphale's on the sides of the dragon man's hips.

"Okay Aziraphale," said Natalie. "Now it's time for you and me to do a very slow motion circus act." 

Much to Natalie's surprise, Aziraphale showed considerable skill at putting an injured person onto an improvised stretcher. He executed all of his moves perfectly. He slipped his hands out from under Natalie's so that Crowley wasn't unsupported for a moment. He helped slip the board up onto the ottoman and right under his own bottom without disturbing Crowley. He talked Natalie through safely folding Crowley's enormous wings and gently wrapping them with a sheet. He lowered Crowley down onto the board with amazing steadiness. He was graceful about working with Natalie to safely untangle his legs from Crowley's so they could be carefully straightened and lifted without disturbing the pelvis. He helped tie Crowley to the board and he was much stronger than Natalie when it came time to lift. 

The whole time that they worked, Aziraphale kept talking to the baby and to Crowley. He said "my love" a lot. Sometimes it was hard to tell who he was talking to. It was hard to know whether either Crowley or the baby was even listening. By the time they got Crowley onto the bed, and the door out from under him, the dragon man was completely unresponsive and the baby was completely hysterical. 

Aziraphale set down his end of the door, ran over to the cot, and picked up the naked baby. He held them in his arms, high against his chest. He fumbled a bit as the baby squirmed, then set the naked baby down again. He knocked an entire stack of neatly folded baby things to the floor as he pulled a blanket from the top of the dresser with shaking hands. Then he wrapped the baby up into a messy bundle and picked them up again. 

"There we are little one," he said. "Papa is here at last. So sorry for the long delay. There we are. No more of that." The baby fussed in his arms and he studied the animated little face as it scrunched and squalled. Aziraphale's mouth opened in a little round O. He made a few little tentative little bounces with his arms. "Aren't you beautiful!"

"Aziraphale," said Natalie. 

The new father turned and looked at the midwife. Natalie had just finished stuffing a pillow under Crowley's legs and she was laying a doubled over blanket over them. 

Natalie looked Aziraphale in the eyes. Then, with a tiny and sad shake of her head, she ended his moment of joy. 

Aziraphale's face crumpled. He took a deep breath. He set the baby down. He took two steps away from the cot, grabbed the bedpost at the foot of the bed and slowly lowered himself until he was sitting on the bed, next to his partner's legs. The mattress barely moved as he settled himself down. Aziraphale put his hands on top of the blood-soaked sheet strips that bound the dragon-man's hips, on either side of the metal kitchen tool that was holding him winched together. The magician closed his eyes in concentration. In the corner of the room, the baby wailed alone in their cot. 

Aziraphale called to his child. "Papa is right here, little one," he said. "Papa will be holding you in his arms again so very soon." Then he was silent. 

Natalie also wanted to pick up the baby, but first she needed to do to everything she could think of that might possibly help Crowley. 

She unbound her patient's wings and laid them flat on the bed. They were soft and light for their size and in the brief moment when she was leaning over them she smelled musk and cedar. Natalie realized that Crowley must oil and perfume his feathers like a human might oil his beard. Maybe the sound of the baby's cries was overwhelming her normal defenses, but the knowledge of the dragon man's little bit of vanity slammed into Natalie like a punch to the gut. Of course he groomed his body. He probably had clothes and jewelry and all the other things that human people had. And now he was naked and broken. 

Natalie suppressed her thoughts before she went any further down that dangerous road. The lapse barely slowed her down. She covered her patient from neck to belly with another doubled over blanket. That was the thing to do for shock, and he seemed to be showing signs of shock, or whatever the dragon man equivalent was. The thing to do next wasn't so clear. The bag of saline was nearly empty, and there wasn't another. It didn't seem safe to inject an antibiotic into the line without at least asking the partner about allergies. And Aziraphale was busy. All she had left to offer for treatment was sutures, but she wasn't going to use them until after Aziraphale was done with whatever he was doing. If the magician had the power to close up wounds, then he would probably do a better job than she would. She wasn't trained to repair deep lacerations.

Now that she had run out of clearly useful things to do, Natalie did less clearly useful things. She checked for the patient's non-existent pulse, took his temperature, and pulled his eyelids back and shined her light into his strange pupils. She could make guesses, but she had no real way to know what was normal or abnormal for a creature like him. At least this way, she would know if anything started to change later. Though what she could do for him if something changed, she didn't know. If he had internal injuries, she had no way to assess them. There was no one to call for back up. And, as far as she could tell, these alien creatures, whatever they were, were completely on their own. They had to be. Why else would they have subjected themselves to her barbaric surgery? She brushed the stray hairs out of her patient's face. That was a little useful. It would at least make it easier for him to breathe. 

"Natalie?" It was the magician. He was looking up at her. Both of his hands were still on his partner's body. His fingers were twitching. His brow was furrowed and his lips were tight. Tears were rolling down his cheeks. 

"If you've done all you can for Crowley, can you please hold the baby?", he said. "It isn't right for them to feel so alone on their first day in the world."

He was right. It was time to tend to the baby. Past time. Natalie had messed up. But only a little. Natalie found one of the few remaining clean towels and threw it over her shoulder so that it covered her blood soaked shirt. She washed her hands. She walked around the foot of the four poster bed. She walked past the magician, bent over his mate. Even though the dragon man's wings were folded, some of his feathers hung off the side of the bed, and she had to brush by them to reach the baby in the cot. The edges of the feathers were crusty with blood and they scratched at the leg of her trousers. 

The baby was angry, but not too cold. Natalie wrapped the blanket around them and held them to her chest and bounced them a little. They brayed and grizzled and flapped. She held them to her chest vertically with her forearm firmly between the flapping wings and her hand supporting the little head. With her other hand, she grabbed a fleecy little one-piece outfit from the top of the dresser. She couldn't spot any nappies. Or dummies. 

She looked over at Aziraphale. He had his eyes closed again. He seemed to be concentrating very hard. She most certainly didn't want to rummage through an alien's dresser drawer, and she couldn't disturb him to ask after the baby supplies. She rearranged the baby in her arms and got the blanket more comfortably around them and crooked her finger and slipped it into the child's mouth. The baby sucked happily and quieted down. She wouldn't use the finger trick normally, but today wasn't a normal day. She spotted a thin little blanket in one of the piles on the dresser. It could be folded to make a nappy, and she could secure it with medical tape. She took the blanket and baby clothes with her. She carried the baby over to her bags and, one handed, pulled out a bottle of baby wash and some cloths and some clean medical tape. 

As she cleaned the baby, Natalie spoke to them. Just nonsense words, the sort of thing she would say to any child. She was exhausted. Her clothes were blood soaked. The last hour had been the most terrifying of her life, and she still wasn't entirely sure whether the magician would even let her keep her memories of all of this. She might just wake up at home with a killer migraine and no memory of the day. All she had was the present moment. She was cleaning and dressing a little winged baby while their human looking parent healed their dragon parent using magic. 

As much as she wished to, Natalie could not help the injured parent, and a pair of perfect little grey eyes beckoned her. So she let herself experience the joyful first moments that, in a fair world, would have belonged to Aziraphale and Crowley. The baby was plump and beautiful. They had perfect round cheeks and bright eyes. Their wings grew fluffier as she dried them with a cloth. The baby looked like a tiny little angel in their little nappy. Natalie was inordinately proud of her improvised nappy. It fit very snugly around the waist and probably wouldn't leak from the legs. 

Now it was time to dress baby in their first outfit. "Well, aren't your parents crafty?", she said, as she tested out the velcro flaps in the back of the little yellow romper. When she unzipped the front, the whole garment split in half. She slipped a little leg and an arm into the garment on one side, and then the other, zipped up the front, rolled baby onto their belly, and then slipped the strip of fleecy fabric up between the little wings and closed the clever velcro closures at the top. The baby's wings were soft and downy. They were a turning a very pretty grey color that matched baby's eyes. 

Natalie wanted to show off the beautiful little angel baby, but Aziraphale had his eyes closed. He had half-collapsed on the bed next to his partner's belly. His hands were still over Crowley's belly and genitals and they were making the little gestures that Natalie had come to associate with his healing magic. 

Natalie picked up the child and laid them on the towel on her chest. The baby curled around the curve of her breast, folding their wings over their entire back, covering themselves in their own private blanket. The thick down wings went from the back of the baby's head all the way down to where their legs curled up. 

Natalie rested her hand under the little bottom, slipping her fingers up under the wings. She felt the the soft down on the backs of her fingers. She laid some towels on the chair to protect it from her clothes, and then she sat in the arm chair with the baby sleeping on her breast. She watched her patient and his partner for a third of an hour. The color seemed to return to Crowley's face, and he started to look more peaceful. Aziraphale gradually collapsed until he was lying on his side, curled up against his partner's middle, with his eyes closed and his hands twitching. 

Natalie stood up, with the baby on her breast, and walked around to the foot of the bed. She squatted a little and picked up a blanket one handed. She pulled it up onto the bed and over them both, covering Crowley up to the belly and Aziraphale up to his shoulders. 

Then she sat down in the arm chair and watched over them and cuddled the angel baby. 


	6. Getting to Know You

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Natalie explores the house while the new family sleeps. Aziraphale learns how to be a father. Crowley meets his baby properly.

After a few minutes, Natalie was sure that both parents were asleep. She checked her watch. It was 1:31 PM. Her lecture had ended at 11:20 AM. A little over two hours ago, Aziraphale had kidnapped her. And now he was completely unconscious. And he'd left his newborn alien-child in her hands. 

This would be an excellent time for Natalie to make her escape, if she was going to. She could steal the winged baby and get her fifteen minutes of fame or she could just slip the baby into the cot and creep out the door of the flat and never look back.

Natalie did consider leaving; she'd have been a fool not to at least think about it. She was very aware that she was sitting in a room with three inhuman creatures, at least one of whom could control her mind. She was very aware that no one knew where she was and that she had no mobile phone. Moreover, for all she knew, she was in a pocket dimension that was lost to time. She hadn't even been able to look out a window since she'd entered this strange Victorian era flat. The kitchen windows were completely blocked by the dense garden on the balcony and the bedroom window was covered in a thick curtain. Her biggest fear was that if she pulled back that curtain to look outside she'd see horse drawn carriages and men in stove pipe hats. 

Right now, since they were all asleep, it was almost possible to pretend that the other beings in the room weren't terrifying inhuman creatures. With the blankets covering all of their feathery and scaly bits, Aziraphale and Crowley looked fairly ordinary. The baby in Natalie's arms was ridiculously attractive for a newborn, but otherwise looked fairly normal. With their tiny wings curled around them, they looked like a photograph from one of those kitchy calendars of newborns dressed up to look like fairies and flowers. 

Of course the baby wasn't a human infant stuffed into a bulky costume. They were a genuine six-limbed alien creature whose parents had magical powers. And, truth be told, Natalie had no idea if the reason the parents trusted her with their child wasn't so much that they'd looked in her heart and seen that she was a good person as that they'd done something to her mind to make it impossible for her to leave. She needed to find out.

Natalie took the baby over to the cot and swaddled them. Now that baby was asleep, it was actually possible to wrap them up in a blanket. The wings made the neck part of the swaddle a little difficult, but baby was a good sleeper who barely started to wake while she wrapped them up, and then settled right back down just as she tucked the last corner of the blanket under and set them on their back. That was a very good piece of luck, but not altogether surprising. After all, this baby was an actual cherub. 

After she put the baby down, Natalie crept out of the bedroom and down the hall to the door of the flat. She opened it and stepped through it, propping it open behind her by wedging a balled up towel between the door and the frame. She crept through the silent stacks of the book shop and down the stairs and all the way to the front of the shop. She opened the front door of the shop and poked her head out. She saw a busy sidewalk on a perfectly ordinary autumn day in modern London. She memorized her street address, then shut and locked the front door of the shop, crept back upstairs into the flat, and looked around for her mobile. 

She didn't find it in the kitchen, and for a few minutes she feared it had been vanished from existence. But she kept looking until she spotted it on a low shelf underneath the bedside stand. The magician must have just messed with her mind so she didn't notice him taking it away. She had to step past the ottoman and a pile of bloody towels to get to it. Once she had it, she sat down in the arm chair and composed a series of text messages to the secretary at the midwifery center that she was based out of. She apologized for missing the lunchtime staff meeting and she explained that she was going to have to miss all of her afternoon appointments. She texted her brother to let him know that she'd used one of the tricks he taught her. She texted her flatmate to say she wasn't going to be home tonight. Then she texted the man who she'd been planning to see at the pub this evening. She let them all know that she was with a family in crisis and she would be unavailable for the day. She made sure that none of her texts were too alarming, but that, collectively, they contained enough information to give the police a good head start. Just in case. Then she put the mobile into power saving mode. There was nowhere in this house to charge it and she needed it to last overnight. 

Even with all her misgivings, Natalie wasn't going to leave this family. They clearly had no one to help them, and they had one parent in traction and the other so exhausted that he'd fallen asleep in the early afternoon. There was no social service professional that Natalie could think of who was prepared to care for people who had wings. That left just her. And she'd promised Crowley that she would see this through. He had put his body into her hands. He had trusted her to make this plan work, and the plan didn't end just with the birth of a healthy baby. 

A birth where the baby is healthy and the parent becomes disabled would not count as a success in Natalie's books. Natalie hated the fact that the best she'd been able to offer her patient was this painful and risky procedure. If Crowley had been human, he would be facing months of rehabilitation and a significant chance of never again being able to walk without pain. While Natalie had high hopes that Aziraphale's magic would spare Crowley from the worst of it, she was still worried. She had a solid reason to suspect that Aziraphale's magical healing wasn't a completely sure thing. In those last minutes before she'd cut him, while she was explaining the risks of the procedure, she was watching Crowley's face very carefully. And his eyes had shown fear. Of course, when she was done talking, he had taken a deep breath and done exactly what she had seen almost every other parent with an endangered infant do. "Right," he had said. "Good to know. Lets do it." And so he offered up his body to be butchered. 

It shouldn't have come down to that moment. No one should have to choose between their child's life and their own permanent disability. That was the point of prenatal care. Because when it came down to the high pressure moment of choice, too many parents were willing to exchange a great risk to their own health for a small improvement in the odds for their baby. Crowley had certainly been willing to make that trade. "Cut them out of me," he had said to Natalie at the beginning. As if she could just deliver a potentially mortal injury to another person on purpose. As if, after meeting him for ten minutes, she could just agree to help him trade his life for his child's. It was true that everyone who decided to go through with a pregnancy made a trade of some sort. Usually it was a blind trade: some unknown future piece of their health for the life of a child. But Natalie's job was to oversee those exchanges and to keep the price fair and reasonable. One healthy child in exchange for stretch marks and fallen arches. A bouncing baby boy for a bad back and bladder problems. Twins for a lost job and a temporary mental illnesses. All difficult trades, but, as these things went, acceptable. Natalie had never yet traded life for life, and she had no intention of ever doing so. 

Natalie's plan had gone reasonably well so far and it had good odds of success, real success, as she defined it, with no permanent damage to parent or child. She had resolved to make sure that Crowley would receive the follow-up care that would allow him to make a full recovery. Even if it meant that she had to move in with these strange creatures for the next few days. Which is why she was sitting in a dimly lit room in blood soaked clothes and scrolling through the websites of companies that sold medical devices. 

Depending on how good the magical healing was, Crowley would be flat on his back for between zero and fourteen days. The temporary traction device made out of a sheet was not going to be good for long. She would have to buy something made of foam and plastic or else he would get pressure sores. Natalie studied a half dozen products until she found a hip stabilizer device that provided enough support and wouldn't put pressure on the pubic region. She verified the address for the bookshop and ordered the hip stabilizer for same day delivery. She would order the rest of the equipment once she had a better idea of how her patient was doing. She desperately wanted to tear the bandages off and look at the wound, but, given the circumstances, it was better to wait on that until Aziraphale, at least, was awake. 

Natalie put her mobile back on low power mode and looked around at the disaster in the bedroom. No one should have to wake up to a room covered in their family member's blood. She walked into the kitchen and looked around for cleaning supplies. She opened the door to every likely cabinet. One of them proved to be an ice box, with an actual block of ice in it. Under the sink was a bucket and some rags. That was all there was. She wandered down the hall. The linen closet had only linens. The other closet was a coat closet. No luck. 

There were two other doors in the hall. The first one she opened proved to be the toilet. Considering how cramped the rest of the flat was, Natalie hadn't expected the toilet to be enormous, but it was. It was as big as the kitchen, and just as thoroughly Victorian. It had a giant claw foot tub right in the middle of the room. The actual toilet itself was antique and had a tank high up on the wall. Right next to a sink that didn't even have hot running water, there was a single reverse anachronism: a set of IKEA shelves filled with expensive looking grooming products. Nowhere in the room were there any cleaning supplies. 

There was one door in the flat that she hadn't opened, and Natalie had very little hope that there would be cleaning supplies behind it. She mostly wanted to open it to make sure that she wasn't in Bluebeard's castle. After all, she might not be the first human that had been kidnapped by this pair. The search for cleaning supplies gave her a plausible excuse to look in every room. She pushed the door open. 

To Natalie's amazement, the last room in the tiny four room flat was a room that looked completely modern. It had a flat screen TV and a modern sofa and coffee table as well as sculptures and two floor-to-ceiling book shelves packed with DVDs and music albums. The music collection contained a lot of vinyl, and there was a turntable and an expensive modern sound system for playing that vinyl. Out of an abundance of caution, Natalie walked into the room and pulled back the curtain on the room's window and looked outside. Down below was a thoroughly ordinary modern alley. She could see cars in the distance. Now she was completely sure that the flat wasn't in some sort of time bubble. Aziraphale and Crowley lived in the same modern world as everyone else and they just happened to like having a nineteenth century kitchen and toilet. For some insane reason. 

It was also insane that there were no cleaning supplies in the flat beyond the bucket and the rags that she'd seen in the kitchen. Maybe they used a maid service. Maybe they loved cleaning with rags. Maybe they could snap their fingers and things would magically clean themselves. Natalie felt dizzy. There was a limit to how many of the aliens' strange personal habits she could contemplate. Natalie returned to the toilet, put a stopper in the tub, filled it with cold water and the bar of soap, and then she hauled the quilt and the least stained towels over from the bedroom and rubbed them with soap and put them in to soak. Hopefully she could save them. 

Natalie cleaned the bedroom next. She put her supplies away. She threw out the unsalvageable sheets and towels. She put the medical waste into plastic biohazard bags. She washed the bedroom floor on hands and knees and dried the floor with a rag. She blotted the stains out of the fabric of the ottoman with a rag soaked in soap and cold water. She moved the furniture back to where it had been. She folded up the one sheet that hadn't been stained or ripped apart and brought it back to its closet. She propped the closet door in the corner of the kitchen behind the wood bin. She washed the rags and wrung them out and laid them over the edge of the bucket. Then she put the bucket into the sink. All done, and the baby had slept through it all. 

Now that the messy things were done, it was time to get herself cleaned up. Natalie rummaged in her bag for a change of clothes and a plastic bag to put her soiled clothes in. She stopped by the open-front linen closet and selected a flannel. Before she freshened herself up, she sat on the edge of the claw foot tub and found all the stains in the quilt and towels and rubbed them all with the bar of soap. She let the tub drain while she washed and dressed, and then she refilled the cold water in the tub and left everything to have a second soak. 

When she got back to the bedroom, Natalie checked her patient again as noninvasively as she could. He seemed to be breathing and warm and comfortable. His skin looked healthy, so that was good. But he had passed almost no urine in all the time she'd been there, and that worried her. She probably would have been willing to tolerate low urine output if this had been a normal delivery, but she was so terribly worried that there were internal injuries and she just needed to see things return to normal. Of course, she didn't even know what normal would be for a dragon-person. And if there were internal injuries, what exactly could she do? It was maddening. She was in a Victorian house, and she was as good as a Victorian doctor. If something went really wrong, the best she could do was to identify that it had happened and give the patient and their family a little advance warning of the impending tragedy.

Natalie tried to shake off her irrational fears. Crowley would probably be just fine. He'd just need a little monitoring and some support. And, even if his recovery was long, Aziraphale would be a great caretaker. The magician was absolutely dedicated to his mate, he was physically strong, and he seemed to have knowledge of how to care for wounded people. It was a shame that he didn't seem to know much about babies. But for all that he was a bit awkward and new-father-ish, Aziraphale was loving and dedicated. He'd figure out how to care for a newborn. Unfortunately, his was going to be a particularly difficult transition to fatherhood. Natalie had seen harder situations, of course, but at least in those cases, there were other people who could help out: relatives and also nurses and counselors and home health aides. For this alien family, there was only Natalie, and she didn't how many days of help she could give them. She hoped that, for Aziraphale's sake, he really could clean by snapping his fingers. Running this household by himself for the next few weeks was going to be Hell. 

Since she was going to be staying for at least the night, Natalie made herself at home. She got herself a glass of water in the kitchen and she sat at the table and ate the energy bar that was in her purse. She checked her messages and decided where she was going to order her dinner from. Then she turned the mobile back to low power mode and settled in to the arm chair in the bedroom and started looking through the little stack of books on the table. Natalie had half hoped for alien books, but all of them seemed to be human books. Only two of them were in English. They were classics: Pride and Prejudice and Salome. The rest of the books were in other languages. She was pretty sure that she could recognize Greek and Latin. And one book was in a language she couldn't identify. These aliens, or whatever they were, were very scholarly. Maybe they were studying human culture. Maybe they were anthropologists. 

Natalie tried to imagine what it would be like to be a stranded anthropologist in the Amazon rainforest and to get injured and to have to call on some local healer for help. That must be what it was like for these creatures. 

They did look human, though. That was the mystery. The baby looked entirely human except for the wings. Aziraphale, what she'd seen of him, looked entirely human. Had they altered themselves to look human in order to blend in? How was that even done? More magic? 

Then Natalie had another thought. As soon as she had the thought, it made so much sense that she couldn't believe she hadn't been thinking it all along. What if they actually were angels? The baby looked exactly like an angel should look. Maybe angels sometimes had odd features, like scales. Then again, the book she was paging through, which was written in the language she didn't recognize at all, had a picture of a winged dragon in it. What if angels could change their forms, and they sometimes appeared as winged dragons and sometimes as traditional European angels? Or maybe they had genders in the sense that some of them looked like angels and some looked like dragons. Either way, these kinds of creatures might have been living among humans since the beginning of history. That made some sense. And they might still be aliens, but the sort of aliens who had insinuated themselves into human culture for millennia. 

But then, why would these two angel-dragons not choose to be among their own kind when they were giving birth? Why were they all alone in London? Were they outcasts or criminals? Were they the last of their kind? Or were they aliens assigned to watch over the earth, and only two aliens at a time ever visited earth, and they accidentally got pregnant while on this long distance mission? And if Aziraphale was indeed an angel or angel-dragon, why didn't he have wings like his mate and child? Had he had them amputated so that he could blend in with the local human population, or could he shapeshift and hide them? Natalie really hoped that he hadn't cut them off. What a horrible thought. No one should have to change the shape of their body just to fit in. 

Natalie turned her thoughts over and over in her mind while she paged through the book about the dragon and looked at the woodcut illustrations. Eventually, the angel baby cried, and she set the book down and went over to pick them up. By the time she was rounding the foot of the bed, Aziraphale had rolled out of bed and was on his feet. Since the cot was on the same side of the bed as he was, he reached the baby first, and he picked them up. 

Natalie silently backed away and, by mutual agreement, they went to the kitchen and sat down. Aziraphale pulled the bedroom door shut behind him so the noise wouldn't wake Crowley. He bounced the mewling baby in his arms. He wasn't quite getting the right rhythm, but even if he had, it probably wouldn't have worked. 

"I think it's time to feed this baby," said Natalie. "Can I help you make a bottle?"

"Oh," said Aziraphale, "I'm afraid we don't have a bottle."

"So," said Natalie, "How were you planning to feed baby?"

"Well," said Aziraphale, "Honestly, Crowley was in charge of the whole feeding plan."

"He was planning to breastfeed?", said Natalie. She hadn't seen any evidence of breasts, but chimpanzees were relatively flat chested, and they seemed to manage. "Is that what your people usually do?"

"Actually," said Aziraphale, "There isn't really a usual way to do this."

"Okay," said Natalie. She was confused. Clearly there were elements of these creatures' biology that she didn't understand. "Babies need to be fed, one way or another," she said. "Otherwise they dehydrate. Crowley might not be up to feeding baby for at least a few days. That often happens with traumatic births. So we need a back up plan. I can go buy a bottle and give them some water, and that will get us through for a few hours, but then we need a real plan." 

Aziraphale sat down at the kitchen table with the baby in his arms. The baby fretted. Aziraphale fretted too. He seemed really upset that the baby was upset. He made as many noises of distress and confusion as the baby did. He narrowed his eyes and shook his head and made agitated noises as if he was thinking through a bunch of possible ideas that wouldn't work. 

"Try a finger in their mouth," said Natalie. She crooked her little finger and demonstrated. "That will give them something to suck on while you think of how you want to feed them."

Aziraphale crooked his little finger and slid it into the baby's mouth. Immediately, the baby settled. They closed their eyes and suckled. A few moments later, Aziraphale's shoulders dropped. His face relaxed. He blew out a lot of air and then closed his eyes. He cradled the baby in a more comfortable position. He closed his eyes for a full minute. 

When he started speaking again, he sounded very deeply content, as if he had been meditating. "I'm certain we will find a way," he said. "Everything has worked out so far." He seemed to be mentally a bit far away, so Natalie asked for some clarification.

"Shall I buy some human baby formula and some bottles?", she asked, "Or is there another plan that you want me to pursue?"

"Crowley will be able to do it," said Aziraphale. "He's very good at those kinds of changes." He looked down at the baby through half-lidded eyes. "You really are beautiful, aren't you?"

That sounded a lot more like wishful thinking than a plan. Natalie poked at her mobile. "There is a pharmacy a few blocks from here," she said. "I should be back pretty quickly. Any brand preferences?"

"Hmmmmm?", said Aziraphale. "Where are you going?"

"Pharmacy."

"Ah," said Aziraphale. He seemed a bit vague. Natalie looked up from her phone. Aziraphale looked like he was falling asleep as he cradled his infant. He had a contented and tired smile. The baby was still suckling on his finger, and their little jaw and throat were moving as if they were swallowing something. Natalie watched carefully for the next few minutes, not sure if she believed what her eyes were telling her. Then the baby stopped sucking and fell asleep. They looked milk drunk. 

"Did you just magically feed the baby with your finger?"

"Hum?", said the father. "Oh, yes I suppose I must have done. I do feel a bit drained. But it felt rather pleasant." He looked down at the infant in his arms. "Clever little one. You figured out how to get the good stuff from your Papa." 

"That doesn't even make sense," said Natalie. "How does that even work?"

"Crowley isn't much for eating food either," said Aziraphale. 

"What does he eat?"

"Nothing really," said Aziraphale. 

That made no sense at all. So Natalie tried again. 

"Are you saying that it's normal for your babies not to need to drink milk?"

"I suppose it must be," said Aziraphale. 

"Don't you know?", said Natalie. 

Aziraphale shook his head no. He yawned. 

"Well, can you find out?", said Natalie. 

Aziraphale shook his head again. 

"How do you know how to read in five languages and not know how your own babies are fed?"

"Forty-seven languages," said Aziraphale, "And, as far as I know, they are the first. Baby, that is. I've not heard of any others. I'm nearly certain I would have heard if there had been any before now."

The next logical question, of course, would be "What kind of creatures are you?" Natalie didn't ask that question. Nor did she ask any of the next half dozen questions that came to her mind. Finally she settled on: "So, in summary, there has never been a baby of your species before, and therefore we have no idea how to care for them?"

"That is correct," said Aziraphale, "To the best of my knowledge." Then he said, seemingly to himself, "Are we a species now?" His jaw dropped and he looked down at the baby with wonder. "We must be. How exciting!"

During this long conversation, Natalie was making her second mistake. The problem with having two patients and only one medical professional, is that when you are caring for one of them, it can be easy to forget about the other. 

In over thirty years of practice, Natalie Fernsby had only had six falls. Two of them weren't even the birthing parent. One was a squeamish husband, and another was the patient's elderly mother. This excellent safety record was because Natalie Fernsby was extremely attentive and proactive, and she almost never lost track of anything. 

The problem with dealing with deeply strange magical creatures is that the mental effort required to get information out of them and the further mental effort required to not completely lose one's mind when the creatures cheerfully violate the laws of reality, tends to make a person, even a medical professional, lose track of important things. 

In her defense, Natalie expected that Crowley wouldn't gain consciousness for hours, and that when he did wake, he'd find himself in agony, and would not try to move at all. Also, she had tied his thighs together to keep his bones aligned while he rested. He really shouldn't have been able to get out of bed at all. Still, when she thought about it later, she was furious with herself. The bedroom door really ought have been left open, and someone should have had their eyes on Crowley. 

"AZIRAPHALE!" 

The shout was powerfully loud, and it was followed, almost immediately, by a thump that shook the crockery in the kitchen cabinets. Natalie's stomach fell. A fall at this stage was exactly the sort of thing that could permanently cripple her patient. She expected to hear whimpers and cries of pain, but, as she ran through the bedroom door, she heard more thumping and a stream of vigorous curses and cries which resolved into delirious screams. 

"No! No! No! Fuck what is this? AZIRAPHALE! They've taken the baby! AZIRAPHALE!"

When she saw her patient lying on the floor, Natalie nearly lost her mind. He was rolling around on his back, trying to untie the sheets that were binding his hips and thighs. His yellow lizard eyes looked like they weren't tracking correctly, and his fingers were fumbling at the kitchen tool tied to his hips. Both of his legs were tangled in the bedding that was still attached to the side of the bed. He didn't have a lot freedom of movement, but he was thrashing his whole body vigorously like a fish that had just been landed on a dock. None of those things shocked Natalie. The thing that made her freeze was that the former dragon man now had no wings at all and his legs had a normal human appearance. In the ten minutes since she had last seen him, Crowley had shapeshifted. 

Even though she had guessed that these creatures could change their bodies, facing the evidence that it was actually real broke Natalie's mind for about fifteen seconds. She stood in the bedroom and gaped at the former dragon-man. 

Aziraphale was still sitting at the kitchen table with the baby in his arms. He stood up very cautiously and walked as if the floor were made of ice and he was carrying a carton of eggs. But he spoke very soothingly.

"Right here darling. I'm right here."

Crowley looked up with unfocused eyes. "They took the baby," he cried. "They tied me up and took the baby!"

"I have the baby right here," said Aziraphale. 

"Did they hurt them? Is our baby okay?", Crowley started dragging himself along the floor with his arms. Then he squealed and started batting at the bedding which trapped his legs against the side of the bed. 

"Everything is fine," said Natalie. She swung into action. She pinned her patient in place and started to untangle the catheter from the sheets. Once there was some slack in the rubber tube, Crowley became significantly less agitated. 

Aziraphale sank to the floor by his mate's side, pulled Crowley's head onto his own thigh, and then lowered the baby so that Crowley could see them. Crowley seemed completely uninterested in the fact that he was lying on the floor nearly naked and tangled in bedding. 

"Are you sure they're all right?", said Crowley, inspecting the baby's face. "We should look them over carefully. How long were they in the hands of those bastards?"

"There aren't any bastards, darling," said Aziraphale. "Just our family and the midwife."

While Aziraphale talked Crowley down from his delusion, Natalie looked him over where he lay. She shined her light into a gap under the sheet-based traction device and she found that the bandages had come loose. She moved them aside and there, hidden in a perfectly human patch of pubic hair, was a long pink vertical scar. She laid her hands on her patient very carefully. His bones seemed stable. The patient tolerated gentle pressure on his hips and pelvis, though he seemed irritated that she was preventing him from wriggling closer to his infant. He ignored her questions about pain in favor of pressing kisses to the baby's forehead and cheeks. 

Natalie found her shears and cut the bandages off the shapeshifter's thighs and hips. She removed the catheter. Moving him as minimally as possible at first, she inspected every bit of her patient. She pressed and felt, using up her last pair of gloves to confirm that, indeed, her patient had time traveled by about six weeks. His uterus had shrunk. Other than the one big scar, there were no wounds. He seemed to have no pain when she rotated his legs in his hip sockets and he didn't react when she pressed on his tailbone. She listened to his conversation, and Crowley seemed to quickly orient to what was really happening, although he seemed to have some memory gaps from the last hours. 

Crowley was still too dizzy to stand on his own, so Natalie held the baby while Aziraphale lifted his mate back onto the bed. He just bent over and lifted Crowley off the floor and onto the bed with no trouble at all. The magician was aghast at the state of the bedding, and he absolutely insisted on untangling the sheets and blankets and getting them lying flat and properly tucked in around Crowley's legs before he would allow Natalie to hand over the sleeping infant. 

As soon as the baby was in his arms, Crowley promptly unwrapped them and started undressing them. This woke baby up, but baby made only a token protest. They seemed content to be in their dad's arms. Aziraphale kicked off his shoes and climbed onto the bed and snuggled next to Crowley, leaning on the cushioned headboard and wrapping his arms around Crowley's shoulders. He nuzzled his mate's cheek as Crowley bent over the baby and explored every centimeter of their little body. 

"Look Aziraphale!" said Crowley, "They have a freckle right here on their lower back just like you do! And another one on their ankle. Look at these long toes! They're going to bark them on the furniture for sure. Look at the shape of their ears. They are just like my ears. And these wings. So beautiful. I can't tell which of us the shape favors, but they have a mix of both of our coloring." 

The baby turned their head a little, and Crowley started making joyful noises.

"Did you just turn your head to look at me? You know Daddy's voice. That's right. That's right. I'm your daddy. And that's your Papa right there. I was just telling Papa that your wings are such a beautiful color. And they are so much cleaner than Daddy's. Daddy's wings are ratty and filthy right now. Miran's wings are beautiful." 

"Wait!", said Aziraphale, "We didn't agree on Miran."

Crowley raised an eyebrow. "I am fuzzy on some of what happened but I distinctly remember you promising me that if I held on--"

"Oh my goodness, I did."

"And I'm making you stick to your promise, Angel."

"Wait," said Natalie, "I thought you were all angels." 

"We're a complicated family," said Crowley. And, for the first time since she had met him, Crowley smiled at her. 


	7. First Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first night is hard. Crowley asks difficult questions. Aziraphale overestimates his own ability to cope. The baby is a good eater.

It was four in the afternoon. Crowley was lying in bed, half covered by the blankets, talking to his three hour old baby. Ten minutes ago, he'd been lying on the floor naked. He was still not dressed. His belly and legs were covered in dried blood and his long hair was matted and tangled, but his yellow eyes were bright and he was babbling intensely at the infant in his arms as he carefully dressed them in their yellow one piece sleeper. He didn't bother with a nappy. 

"There you are, my beautiful one. You know me, I'm your Daddy. Do you know my voice? I know yours. I heard you calling to me the moment you came into the world. I tried so hard to reach you, and then when I couldn't hear you anymore I thought you were gone. But you weren't gone, were you? Your Papa was taking care of you."

As Crowley talked to the baby, Aziraphale, on the bed beside him, slipped down into the pillows and closed his eyes and started to drift off. 

"See? There's your clever Papa," said Crowley. "He saved us both, you know. He ran out and got help when your Daddy didn't know what to do. Your clever Papa had a sneaky plan and he saved us both. And over there is the human who helped Daddy and Papa to help you be born. You're going to meet lots of humans, but this human is special, because she saved your life and then welcomed you to the world. And I can't even remember her name because I can't seem to remember much of anything. Except your voice. I will always remember your voice when you called to me for the first time. My Miran. My love."

Crowley continued to inspect his child as he spoke to them. He stared at their eyes. He ran his fingers through their wispy hair. He touched his fingertips to their wingtips. He let the little fingers close around his own. Then he lifted the little hand closer to his own eyes and made a cluck of disapproval. 

"That won't do at all," he said to the baby. He looked over at his sleeping mate. Then, for the second time since he'd returned to consciousness, Crowley addressed Natalie. He didn't meet her eyes. He just lifted his head and looked off over her shoulder as he spoke. 

"Excuse me," said Crowley, "There's a little box in the top drawer of the dresser. Can you bring it here?"

Natalie did so. It proved to be a box of baby toiletry items. Crowley took out a tiny nail clipper. Then, with practiced efficiency, he clipped the tiny nails. He finished up and handed the clipper back. Then he laid Miran on his chest, right where his heart should be. The baby rustled their wings and then settled down, wrapping their wings around themselves. 

"You're a natural," said Natalie. 

"Eh," said Crowley. He shrugged. He kept his eyes trained on his infant.

"How is your pain?", said Natalie.

"Eh", answered Crowley. "What's it matter?"

"I can get you some pain medications," said Natalie, "Get you a brace to support you. I can show you how to sit and lie more comfortably. If you want."

Crowley shrugged. "I've had worse. I'll be fine." Then he changed the topic. "I seem to have forgotten your name." 

"I'm Natalie."

"All right, then, Natalie?" said Crowley, "Haven't run off yet, I see." He was staring through the open doorway into the kitchen. She was in his periphery, and his eyes never came anywhere near where she was standing. 

"I thought I'd stay for at least a day, and get you off to a good start."

"Generous," said Crowley. "Is that your usual policy for occult births?"

There wasn't a way to answer that. She just stared him down. From the side. He never actually moved his eyes to meet hers, but he smirked as he stared off into the distance. 

"Well, if you're staying, can I buy you dinner? Or breakfast, or whatever meal we're at?"

"Thanks," said Natalie. "Yes, please." 

"Right," said Crowley. "There are some menus on top of the icebox. Pick out what you like and let me know what it is."

The menus were not take away menus. They were leather bound. Natalie found a menu where she actually knew what most of the foods were. She scanned until she found a simple cheeseburger. The price was three times what she'd normally pay.

"Really?", said Crowley, when she brought the menu over to him. "Miran, did you hear that? She saved your life and she thinks I'm going to buy her a cheeseburger." He kissed the sleeping child on the top of their head. He glanced up at Natalie for the barest fraction of second. "I'll get you the filet." 

It turned out that the shapeshifter had a mobile, like a regular person. It was, in fact, lost, but Crowley gave her a list of likely spots, and Natalie located it in the cushions of the sofa. When she brought it to him, he called the restaurant, gave his name, and ordered a three course meal with multiple starters and desserts. He didn't seem to need to look at the menu to know what he wanted. He didn't even give them a credit card number. They seemed to know him, because at one point he said. "Yes, absolutely, Aziraphale would love that." 

There was a little back and forth where Crowley gave them Natalie's number to text when they arrived. 

"Would you like some help getting yourself dressed," said Natalie, "While we wait?"

"Naw," said Crowley. "Too tired for clothes. I'm going to rest." 

"Sponge bath?", said Natalie.

Crowley recoiled, subtly. He clearly didn't want her hands on him. 

"What if I give you a damp flannel and you clean yourself?" 

"Too cold," he said. "I'll wait for Aziraphale to wake up." 

"How about a nappy for Miran, at least," said Natalie.

Crowley directed an incredulous look in her general direction and made a scornful noise.

"If you don't put a nappy on them, you'll wake up in a sticky mess," said Natalie.

"Really, what are the chances of that?", said Crowley. "Can't live in fear." And he covered himself and the baby in a light baby blanket and wrapped his hands around the baby and closed his eyes. 

Fifty minutes later, Natalie got a text. There was a very overburdened delivery person at the door of the book shop. Natalie didn't have the skill to wrangle five enormous paper bags at once, so she had to take three trips to carry all the food from the door of the shop all the way upstairs and into the flat. The whole family was still asleep, so Natalie ate her filet mignon alone. It was incredible. The beef melted like butter on her tongue and the sauce and the vegetables were exquisite. It might well have been the best meal she had eaten in years, and she was eating it in a Victorian kitchen with three sleeping angels or angel-dragons in the next room. 

Just as she was finishing her last bite, the baby started fussing again. Natalie was still sitting at the table, but the bedroom door was open, so she could see the three of them snuggling in bed. Aziraphale was pressed to his mate's side, sound asleep. The baby was lying on Crowley's chest and mewling and raising their head and stretching out their wings. Crowley seemed awake. He was tilting his head from side to side. His eyes were squeezed shut. He looked like he was straining to do something. He opened his eyes, looked at the baby, then bit his lips and closed his eyes again. At last he opened his eyes and shifted a little and elbowed his mate.

"Angel," said Crowley. Aziraphale groaned. "Aziraphale," said Crowley. There was an edge of panic in his voice. "The baby is hungry."

Aziraphale made a quiet mumble.

"The baby is hungry, love, and I'm trying but I just can't. I'm so wrung out." 

"Finger," said Aziraphale. He lifted up his head and propped himself up on one arm. 

"What?", said Crowley.

"You don't need breasts at all. They just take the energy directly. I did it myself and it worked perfectly." 

"How'd you figure that out?", said Crowley.

"Natalie suggested it."

"Humpf," said Crowley, and he adjusted the baby in his arms and crooked his little finger and gave it to the baby. He made a surprised noise. "Wow. Yeah, that works." He yawned and snuggled his mate. " 'Course, if they eat like this every two hours, I'll never find enough energy for clothes."

"You could just borrow something of mine," said Aziraphale. "It wouldn't kill you."

Crowley made a petulant face. 

"I can feed them," said Aziraphale, "I'd rather you build up your strength."

"Naw," said Crowley, "We should trade off. Get them used to us both. It will make it easier in the long run. Anyway, food's here. You should eat." 

Aziraphale sat up. "Oh! Is that lamb that I smell?", he said. 

"I also got the chestnut pumpkin tortellini and an order of scallops and some French onion soup," said Crowley. "Figured you'd want to celebrate." 

"But can you even come to table?", said Aziraphale.

Crowley wrinkled his nose and shook his head no. Aziraphale raised an eyebrow. 

"S'not that bad, Angel." 

Aziraphale reached a hand over and rested it on his mate's belly. 

"No," said Crowley, "Stop that. One of us needs to be up and about, and that's you. If you wear yourself out again, there'll be no one to look after me and Miran. So go eat your dinner while it's still warm." 

Aziraphale kissed Crowley and the baby and got out of bed. He circled round the mountain of paper bags on the dining room table. He sniffed, and then started opening bags and boxes and laying the food out with exaggerated care and many appreciative noises. He described each food to Crowley, taking little tastes as he went, and the dragon-angel nodded happily. This went on for five minutes. 

"Can I bring you something, Crowley?" said Natalie. She had spotted a cup of soup that looked like it would be just the thing to start him off with, and it had likely cooled down enough that he could eat it in bed. 

"Not really much of an eater," he replied. "Thanks."

Natalie looked incredulously at Aziraphale, who was gleefully sampling sauces with the tips of his fingers. She cleared her throat. The magician looked up at her and seemed suitably ashamed. Then, instead of bringing his mate some food, he opened a kitchen drawer, took out a dozen spoons, and used them to take individual tastes from each of the boxes of food. Natalie cleared her throat again. She raised an eyebrow and jerked her head in Crowley's direction.

"I know," said Aziraphale, "He's a lost cause. I've tried for ages. But I'm hoping that Miran, at least, will share my love of food. When they're older." 

"Is there anything Crowley can eat?"

Aziraphale shrugged. 

"So you eat gourmet food," said Natalie, "And he and the baby just live on air?"

Aziraphale nodded. 

"I do drink," said Crowley.

"Quite right!" replied Aziraphale. He set down his tasting spoon and bustled over to the cabinets to pull out a bottle of champagne and three glasses. He popped the cork and poured. He gave Natalie a glass and then slithered onto the bed with the other two glasses balanced in his hands. He waited for Crowley to rearrange the suckling baby and then handed him his champagne. 

"To Miran!", said Crowley, meeting his mate's eyes and raising his glass, "Conceived in love and born on Earth!"

Aziraphale and Crowley both drained their glasses. Natalie wanted to object to Crowley consuming alcohol while feeding a newborn, but she couldn't quite get her mind around what she might say. Did alcohol get into the life-force-energy or whatever it was that he was feeding the baby? She couldn't tell at all. Natalie was also a little worried about him having alcohol and falling asleep with the baby. It didn't seem terribly safe, and so she hovered nearby, awkwardly, sipping her champagne very slowly, watching Crowley pseudo-nursing the baby. Crowley seemed deeply happy and deeply exhausted. When he was done with the feeding, she suggested that Aziraphale hold the baby so that Crowley could sleep, and her plan was soundly rejected by both parents. Crowley put the baby back on his chest to sleep.

A few minutes later, Natalie was sitting at the table, looking through the open door of the bedroom and nervously watching the dozing dragon-angel and his feathered baby as Aziraphale worked his way through the rack of lamb.

"You needn't worry," said the angel-man. "He's very good with babies and he's not the least bit impaired after one glass. He normally drinks a bottle of Scotch in one sitting." Then he sliced a cut off of the lamb and put it on a plate and held it out to her. "This is really good, you should try it."

Thenceforth, he shared the choicest bits of every single thing that he ate, and between all of those bites, it was nearly an entire second dinner for Natalie. With every course, Aziraphale seemed to have an amusing food related anecdote. He was actually charming. Crowley seemed to think so too, judging by the occasional sleepy sounding snickers that came from the bedroom.

While they were done feasting, Natalie and Aziraphale carefully packed up the leftovers, and then Aziraphale opened up one of the wooden doors of icebox and started neatly stacking the food inside. Natalie handed him the boxes one at a time. Suddenly he stopped accepting boxes. He cursed. 

"Angel?", said Crowley, from the bedroom. "Is everything okay?" 

"Sorry," said Aziraphale. "Its just that the . . . the, whatsit, the drip tray is full. The ice block is melting." He cursed again. "I've had this block for . . . " He glanced up at Natalie and made a frustrated noise. Then he pulled the tray of water out and carried it across the room and tipped it carefully into the sink. He replaced the tray and finished loading the food into the icebox and then walked to the door of the bedroom.

"Darling," said Aziraphale. "When you get a chance, can you use the internet to find the local ice delivery service and put in an order for delivery on Monday? I think we want about a 50 pound block. Although I suppose they must sell ice blocks by the kilo now. Modern times."

"Oh, Angel," said Crowley. 

"What?" said Aziraphale. 

"Nothing," said Crowley, "I'll deal with it tomorrow, okay? Just don't worry about it."

Aziraphale seemed really upset about the ice. He seemed near tears. Crowley waved him over to the bedside and the angel-man leaned over and Crowley whispered something in his ear. Aziraphale gave a sad little nod. He kissed the baby and then ran his fingers through his mate's hair. Or tried to. His fingers got tangled pretty quickly.

Aziraphale made a face. "Your hair," he said. "We need to clean you up. And, as much as you deserve one, a hot bath is clearly not in the cards for tonight. You'll have to make do with a sponge bath. I'm so sorry." 

"A sponge bath would be perfect," said Crowley. "Just save your energy for the baby, okay?"

Aziraphale nodded sadly and returned to the kitchen. Natalie had finished packing the ice box. The angel-man checked her work, nodded in approval and then walked over to the stove and started fiddling with the knob on the side of its metal chimney. Then he opened a large door on its side and inspected the innards of the iron beast. He seemed satisfied with what he saw. He picked up the stove tool that had so recently been a medical device, and he used it to pry up one of the metal disks on top of the stove. This opened a hole. Aziraphale took one of the empty paper bags from the delivery order and tore it into strips. He balled up the paper and stuffed it into the hole in the stove top and then he added in some wood from the wood box. 

The final strip of paper bag was made into a twist of paper which Aziraphale lit with a funny flint and steel and string device. His back was turned, so Natalie couldn't see exactly how he did it, but there were sparks and blowing and then the twist of paper was lit. The angel-man lit the fire with his twist of paper, then he used the stove tool to pick up the metal burner and slide it back in place. He peered at his fire through the side of the oven then closed the door, adjusted some grates, passed his hand over the iron surface of the stove and nodded in satisfaction. 

"Wow!" said Natalie, as she watched the angel-man fill up a pot in the sink, "I've never seen one of those stoves used in real life. That's incredible. Although I suppose if you wanted a full bath you'd have to spend hours heating up water on the stove, right?"

Aziraphale gave her a funny look. It was sort of half-tired, half-exasperated. 

He set the small pot on the stove and then wandered off down the hall. He came back with a hair brush and a comb and piece of black ribbon. He set them down on the bedside table, and then he brought the ottoman over next to the bed. He sat down on it and leaned over and whispered to his mate. Crowley gave him an incredulous look and whispered something back. Aziraphale said something else and Crowley rolled his eyes and shrugged and then Aziraphale came over to the kitchen and took Natalie's hand in both of his own. 

"Natalie," said the angel-man, "I can't tell you how grateful Crowley and I are to you for saving Miran." 

He let go of her hands. 

"However, I think its time for my family to be together, just the three of us," he said. "I wish I could give you recompense tonight. We will find you and give you your reward as soon as we are able." 

"Are you sure?", said Natalie. "I can stay the night. You might need an extra set of hands."

"We'll be fine, thank you," said Aziraphale. 

"Okay," said Natalie. "I'll get my things. It was an honor to meet all of you. I wish you the best of luck."

"Thank you," said Aziraphale. Then he said to his mate. "I think if you roll onto your side, darling, I can sit next to the bed and untangle your hair while we wait for the water to heat."

Crowley wrapped his arms around the baby and rolled to the side. He let out a hiss of pain. Natalie and Aziraphale both rushed to the bedside. 

"It's fine," said Crowley. His eyes were squeezed shut, and he was lying very stiffly on his side with the baby high in his arms. 

"If you want to lay on your side," said Natalie, "We can try a firm pillow between your legs."

"Maybe I should take the baby," said Aziraphale.

"No, if this is what we're doing, then lets just do it," said Crowley. He slowly lowered the baby to the bed so that Miran's head was resting on his crooked lower arm and their body was on the sheets. "We're fine. See. They're comfortable. I'm . . . okay." He batted his mate's hand away from his hip. "Don't. You still have to feed the baby when they wake."

"I could run out and get you a supply of ibuprofin," said Natalie. "It would probably help some. And there should be a brace arriving soon."

"Thank you," said Aziraphale, "But I will take care of all of it." Then he sat down and pulled a brush through the tangles in his mate's hair. 

Crowley flinched and pulled away from the brush, and this motion caused him to wince and then he twitched again, and then the baby woke and started to cry. Aziraphale set the brush down and tried to reach over Crowley and take the baby, but he was awkward about it, and he couldn't find a good angle to pick the baby up. Finally he gave up and walked around the other side of the bed and crawled in and took the baby into his arms. 

Crowley blew air out through his lips. Then he reached an arm upward to Natalie and allowed her to help him roll onto his back again. He let her adjust his pillows. He rolled his eyes at his mate, who was starting to fall asleep again, the suckling baby in his arms. 

"Yeah," said Crowley, "Natalie, could you mind the stove please?" 

The dragon-angel talked her through banking the fire in the stove. While she worked, he poked at his mobile. Then he called her over. 

"Is this the right one?", he said, pointing to his screen. A bottle of ibuprofen was on the screen. 

"Yes," said Natalie. 

She helped him find a suitable baby wash and paracetamol. He picked out a hair detangler and some bath towels. With no apparent need for magic at all, Crowley arranged for a late night grocery delivery. Then he asked for Natalie's help moving the baby from Aziraphale's arms to his own, and he fell asleep again with the baby on his chest. Natalie covered the reading lamp in the bedroom with a baby blanket to dim the light. Then she went back into the kitchen and wiped down the table. She washed the dishes with bar soap and cold water and her hands. She triple rinsed everything. 

When Crowley's delivery came, Natalie went out to the street to fetch it and she was pleased to find that there was an extra box on the stoop. It was the hip stabilizer. She woke Crowley and dosed him with the highest safe dose of pain killers. She unpacked the hip stabilizer, and he refused it. The water on the stove was lukewarm, so she offered him a bowl and some warm wet cloths with a little baby soap on them, and she turned her back and held the baby while he cleaned himself. A few minutes later, Miran cried again, and Natalie brought them over to Crowley for another feeding. 

She checked her watch. It was nearly eleven PM. The fire in the stove seemed to be completely out. While he fed the baby, Crowley told Natalie how to shut the grates and the flue. Then he let her swaddle the baby and put them into their cot. Natalie was just settling back into her chair when she heard the dragon-angel's voice in the darkness. He was whispering, and his voice sounded very small.

"Did I do something wrong to get them stuck? I thought crouching on all fours or squatting was supposed to work. I tried them both, but it seemed to make it all worse."

The real answer was not an easy one, but Natalie knew that the dragon-angel expected complete honesty. Natalie also noticed that Crowley had waited until his mate was asleep to ask this question. She wasn't sure what that meant, but she did her best to answer him. 

"There was nothing you could have done to have a normal vaginal delivery," said Natalie. "Even if Miran had been in a head down position, they would not have fit through your pelvic opening."

"There was nothing I could have done differently? Nothing?"

"Absolutely nothing," said Natalie. "If I had been involved with your pregnancy from the beginning, we would have scheduled a surgical birth."

"But Miran is normal sized," said Crowley. 

"Large side of normal, but not unheard of," said Natalie. 

"So it _was_ me." 

Natalie took a moment to try to compose her words, and the moment was too long.

"What exactly is wrong with my body? I need you to tell me." His whisper was very urgent.

"Bodies aren't right or wrong," said Natalie. "They just are. And the shape of your body doesn't have to limit your plans for your family. If you choose to have another child in the future, we can--" 

"What is the right shape?", he asked. "Are there pictures somewhere that show the right shape?" 

She heard something strange, in the tone of his questions. He wasn't ashamed of his body. He wasn't idly curious either. Something else was happening, and even as she was starting to formulate her answer, Natalie remembered that she was talking to a shapeshifter. 

Natalie powered up her mobile and found some diagrams of cis-male-typical and cis-female-typical pelvis shapes. She dimmed the screen and then brought it to the bedside and handed it over. As Crowley scrolled through the pictures, she pointed out the important differences and explained that most people who had a uterus and were fertile had also developed wider hips during puberty. His vertical pupils widened as he took in the information. He made her send him a link to the web site they were viewing. 

"I just didn't think of it," he said. "Aziraphale likes my . . . Well it's about more than aesthetics, obviously. Thank you. That was very helpful."

The shapeshifter needed some sleep after that. He let Natalie help him pull up the blankets, then he slipped his hand over onto his mate's flank and fell asleep. 

It was quiet in the little house. Natalie sat in the chair in the bedroom with her feet up and dozed. She drifted in and out of consciousness, and somewhere in her half-dreams, she came to a realization: The angels had only so much life-force or miraculous power or magic, and when they fed it to the baby, they had none left to do whatever they wanted. Like healing. Or shapeshifting. Or mind control. Or, perhaps, warming the bath water and keeping the ice box cold. That meant, of course, that she could leave anytime she wanted. And they couldn't read her mind. It made her feel a lot more comfortable. At least for tonight, Aziraphale and Crowley were as helpless as humans. 

Natalie's dreams and revelations were interrupted by a wail from Miran in the wee hours of the morning. Aziraphale and Crowley both woke up and had a confused and sleepy argument about whose turn it was to feed the baby. Neither of them seemed very sure about who had fed them last. Natalie settled the debate by sweeping round the bed and picking up the baby and handing them to Aziraphale. Aziraphale gave her a startled look.

"He asked me to stay," she said, pointing at Crowley.

"Yep," said the dragon-angel. "True." 

Crowley dozed off again. Aziraphale sat up in bed, the baby in his arms, and fed them in his strange magical way. Natalie had just come to accept it. Clearly it worked. If baby was starving, it would be obvious by now. 

When Aziraphale finished feeding the baby, he tried to set them down in the cot, and Miran refused to settle. When the baby's noises started to wake Crowley, the angel-man handed Miran over to Natalie. Natalie swaddled the baby and got them to fall asleep in the cot while Aziraphale wrapped his arms around his mate's middle and closed his eyes. Even in the low light, Natalie could see the tiny movements of his fingers. 

Everyone slept for another hour and a half, and then Miran woke again and Natalie handed them to Crowley to feed. Afterwards, she settled the baby back to sleep in the cot. Aziraphale managed completely on his own for the next feeding, and then, at twilight, when the baby cried again, the angel-man rolled out of bed with a groan, plucked the baby from the cot and handed them over to Crowley. 

"I give up," said Aziraphale. "It's close enough to morning. I'm making tea." 

Natalie shuffled into to the kitchen after him. A grey sort of light was filtering in through the plant room. She hoped to see the old stove in operation again, but Aziraphale simply filled a kettle with water and set it on the top of the cold stove. He found a tea pot and scooped in some tea from a tin. The kettle whistled just as he was putting the tin away, and he filled the pot and put a cozy on it. Then he pulled two of the boxes of food out of the ice box and served her a breakfast of tiramisu and profiteroles. 

"Well," said Aziraphale. He still looked exhausted. But it was possible to imagine that he was a bit less exhausted than yesterday. Obviously he was doing magic again, so he must have caught up on his rest at least a bit. That was good for him although not necessarily good for Natalie. 

"Well," said Natalie.

"I'm not sure whether I should thank you first or apologize first," said Aziraphale.

"You mean for abducting me?", said Natalie.

"Well, yes," said Aziraphale. "That too." His eyes shifted around a little. "But also I shouldn't have tried to send you away last night. I underestimated how long it would take for us to get our feet back underneath us, as it were. You were right."

"The first nights with a new baby are hard on everyone," said Natalie. 

Aziraphale nodded. He looked like he would rather not to say anything more on the matter. But he ate a few more bites in silence, and then he took a deep breath and plowed on. 

"As to the abduction: Crowley and I are fairly private people, and I'm afraid we were reluctant to get help until we found ourselves in a truly dire situation." His words tumbled out over each other in a rush. "I am ashamed of the manner in which I was forced to obtain your assistance, and I am grateful that, despite the bad beginning, you stuck with us. I have no doubt that you saved both Miran and Crowley yesterday, and I only regret that I can neither apologize nor thank you adequately." 

"It's my job," said Natalie. She wasn't prepared to manage the emotions of a magical angel-man, so she kept it simple. 

Crowley piped up from the bedroom "Why did you stay?", he asked, "After you figured out we weren't humans?"

Natalie wondered if she even needed to answer, considering that the dragon-angel was a mind-reader. Then again, he probably couldn't read minds at the exact moment that his magical life force was being drained by a nursing baby. 

"Honestly," she said, "I think it was because I could see that you two love each other deeply." 

"Hmphf," said the dragon-angel. He hid his face for a few moments by nuzzling the top of the baby's head. Then he looked up and spoke again. "Now you get to ask us a question. S'only fair."

Natalie had a million questions, and most of them seemed really unwise to ask. So finally she said: "What would you have done if I had run out the door?"

"Well," said Aziraphale. "I do know how to use a box-cutter knife."

"I'm glad I stayed then," said Natalie. 

"Why didn't you ask what we are planning to do with you?", said Crowley. "That would have been the smart question."

"How about this question?", said Natalie. "How soon can you start getting support from your own kind of people?"

"Clever human," said Crowley. "What do you think the answer is?"

"I think that you are going to be on your own for a while. If you'd have been able to get help in any kind of reasonable time frame, you'd have done it at soon as you knew you were pregnant."

"Very clever indeed," said Crowley. "What are your other questions?"

"Can you walk around?", said Natalie. "How much weight has the baby lost? Those would be my normal questions at this stage." 

"We aren't normal, though," said Crowley.

"I know," said Natalie, "That's why I haven't counted soiled nappies. If your baby was a human, I would think they were dehydrated."

"Are you too afraid to ask us what we are?", said Crowley.

"Shouldn't I be?", said Natalie. 

"I like you," said Crowley. "I'll answer all your questions. But I want my tea first. Aziraphale, will you take the baby?"

While Crowley drank his tea in bed, Natalie, Miran, and Aziraphale headed to the toilet to check out the state of the quilt. Aziraphale walked extremely slowly when he carried the baby down the hall, but he wouldn't let Natalie carry Miran. He let Natalie hold up the wet quilt for him to inspect, and he thanked her for washing it. Aziraphale was glad that all the stains had come out but was quite distressed that the quilt was wet. He was lamenting the fact that he'd have to string a drying line across the kitchen, when Natalie mentioned the possibility of using a laundromat. He got a little overexcited at that point. "Yes!", he said "Miran and I could go to the laundromat, and I could read them the book about the little bear who gets lost in a laundromat. It is always nice for children when you can pair a book with an outing."

Natalie refrained from criticizing this plan. From what she had seen of Crowley's parenting skills, he would swiftly put the kibosh on this ridiculous idea. When Aziraphale returned to the bedroom to propose the newborn in a laundromat plan to his mate, Crowley was diplomatic. "We can talk about that later, Angel," he said, "We need to let our midwife get home."

"So, Natalie," said Crowley, "As a down payment on what I owe you for saving my child's life, the answers to all your questions. Why don't you weigh Miran while Aziraphale finds something not too horrible for me to wear and then I'll prove I can walk so you don't worry about me."

Natalie pulled out the little card that she had begun to fill out the day before. The time of birth and the birth weight were already recorded. Miran was asleep, but she stripped them out of their clothes anyway and weighed them. 

"Four thousand, four hundred and eighty eight grams," she said, over the baby's wails. "They've gained seventeen grams already."

"Is that good?", said Aziraphale.

"Yes, Angel," said Crowley, "It's very good." He made a sour face at the set of light blue flannel pyjamas that Aziraphale was holding out to him. "Is that really the best option you can give me?"

"If you don't like it, then go naked," said the angel-man, "Or actually _buy_ something for once. I'm sure your internet can send you something you'll like better."

Crowley swiped at the clothes. Natalie dressed the baby again, laying them on their back on the chair, and averting her eyes to give the dragon-angel his privacy. She listened to him grouse as his mate helped dress him. The baby was grousing too, as she dressed them. It was kind of cute how parent and child harmonized. 

"I can actually get dressed on my own," Crowley said. "I'm not going to fall again. You're being ridiculous." A minute later, he said: "I'm decent. Come over here and show me what's on that piece of paper." He was sitting on the side of the bed with his feet on the floor.

"I didn't know how to spell your names," Natalie said, as she handed him the birth record, "So I left them blank."

"What's this letter for?", said Crowley, pointing to where Natalie had drawn in the letter "I" and a little box and a tick mark. 

"Gender. The form is a little heteronormative. I had to make a change."

"But humans have babies like Miran," said Aziraphale, "It's not that uncommon, so surely they must have some way to designate--," He peered at the form. 

"No," said Natalie. "Just 'M' or 'F'." 

"But how does one even know at this stage?", said Aziraphale. "It's ridiculous. Crowley and I can't even tell Miran's gender and we can--", his eyes darted back and forth as he loudly failed to mention that he and Crowley could read minds. For a mind reader, he was a truly terrible liar. 

"They make a guess," said Natalie, "The doctors." 

"Well," said Aziraphale. "It seems silly to worry about gender with babies. Although, I suppose, it is just paperwork, and if someone marks the gender wrong on the birth forms, it would a simple enough matter to correct it later." 

Natalie was about to explain the actual truth about how maddeningly difficult and expensive it was to correct a gender designation when Crowley made a gesture that very unambiguously told her to shut her mouth. 

Aziraphale took the flapping baby back into his own arms and was nuzzling the top of their head. "I'm glad we don't have to submit any ridiculous forms for you, little one," he said. "Can you imagine what they'd say when we refused to specify your gender?" 

"I'm going to stand up now," said Crowley to Natalie. "Then I'm going to walk to the kitchen, so you can see that I'm fine, and you'll stop worrying."

Crowley put a hand on the bed post for balance but he stood up using the muscles of his legs. He walked slowly towards the kitchen and his gait was perfectly sound and even. He was right about the flannel pyjamas. They did look awful. They hung on his narrow frame like a set of drapes and the bottoms only reached to his mid-calves.

"Pain level?", said Natalie.

"Two when I walk," he said, "And zero when I'm lying down."

"That's a lot better than last night," said Natalie. She glanced at Aziraphale, and the angel-man was regarding his mate with a proud and self-satisfied smile. 

The dragon-angel sat down in a wooden kitchen chair and winced. He saw Natalie staring at him. "Three, if you must know," he said. He turned to his mate. "Give Miran over to me."

"It's actually still my turn," said Aziraphale. 

"I walked over here," said Crowley, "I deserve a reward."

Aziraphale huffed and handed the baby to his mate. Once the baby was settled in his arms, the dragon-angel spoke to Natalie. He looked her in the eyes. His gaze was intense. His eyes flicked back and forth between hers as he spoke as if he was trying to measure how his words were landing. 

"I'm going to answer the questions you didn't ask. The ones I can answer. First: We are going to let you go. I know that you aren't about to lead a bunch of humans with pitch forks and torches to our door because you went through a lot of trouble to save Miran's life, and you wouldn't want to endanger them after all that. Second: Aziraphale and I aren't human, obviously, but we have been living on Earth for thousands of years and we haven't harmed it yet, and we don't ever intend to. We love this world. It's ours too, and we have sworn to protect it. So no need for you to worry on that count. We just want to continue to live our quiet, comfortable little lives just like we always have. We're very good at keeping people from noticing us, but we'll let you remember us as long you don't say anything to any other humans. Got it?"

Natalie nodded and the dragon-angel continued. 

"Good. As a separate matter: We are in your debt for saving my life and the life of our child. We can't do it today, but Aziraphale and I fully intend to pay that debt." He looked over at his mate. "I think that's everything. Did I miss anything?"

"No," said Aziraphale, "That covers everything."

"Wait," said Crowley. "She wanted to know if we are angels."

"Oh," said Aziraphale.

"Up to you," said Crowley.

"Well," said Aziraphale, glancing at his mate. "The answer is yes, we are. After a fashion. It's a bit . . . complicated. We're, well, the others consider us to be, a bit defective. We ask too many questions. We're too reckless in our affection for each other. So we've been, more or less, banished to the Earth."

"Which is actually perfect for us," said Crowley. "Forced to live in this beautiful paradise. Not so bad really. Now, shall we order you a car?"

Natalie arrived home at 7:15 in the morning. She went straight to bed and stayed there for nine hours. She spent Saturday evening and Sunday just resting and binge watching television with her new boyfriend, who received that designation for not only not minding the fact that she couldn't meet him the night she was with the angel family but also showing up to her flat with wine and pizza when she texted him on Saturday night. On Monday morning she had a perfectly normal day. She stopped by and saw the angel family and they were tired but thriving. The baby had gained an astounding 81 grams. On Tuesday Natalie attended a birth, a perfectly ordinary one by her standards, just a mother who was partially blind and not particularly trusting of doctors. And the weeks went on, just like normal. Autumn turned to winter and then winter to spring, and she didn't hear from her strange inhuman clients again. 

Then, on a Monday in the third week of April, Natalie got an email from an association of queer midwives in the United States. Someone had donated ten thousand airline miles to their organization and they wanted to use them to fly Natalie Fernsby to the States to be their keynote speaker at a conference they were organizing about birth justice issues. The next day, she got a call from a group of pregnant military veterans who had formed a support group and were looking for someone who could speak to them about pregnancy and mental health. The day after that, a very enthusiastic young doctor showed up in her office. The doctor had just received a massive private grant to study prenatal interventions for pregnant teenagers living in poverty, and he was looking to hire an expert midwife to help him run the study. And on Thursday morning, an elderly gay couple stopped by Natalie's office to ask her which reproductive health organizations they should include in their bequest. 

On the fifth morning, rather than opening her email or going into the office, Natalie stopped by the book shop in Soho. When the bell above the door rang, Aziraphale ran out from the back. 

"Not to worry, darling!", he shouted over his shoulder, "It's just our midwife, come to check on us."

The angel-man waved Natalie into the shop and through a maze of bookshelves to where Crowley was lounging on a sofa with a plump little winged cherub sitting in his lap. This part of the shop looked like a children's library. A dozen picture books were stacked on the sofa and thousands more filled the nearby shelves. Miran was mouthing a wooden ring and drooling into a board book. When Natalie came near the baby looked up at her and said "ah".

"Guess who finally started sleeping through the night!", said Crowley. "Five nights in a row, it's been."

"Congratulations!", said Natalie. "You know, I had a sneaking suspicion that something like that had happened."

Crowley smirked. "I told him that he was going to overwhelm you. My partner can get a little over enthusiastic sometimes." 

Natalie Fernsby was not an easy person to overwhelm. She believed that everyone had the right to have the safest and most dignified birth experience that was possible for them. And she was willing to do whatever it took to make those good births happen for as many people as possible, even if she had to do things that other people would be afraid to do. 

"I don't think we need to slow down too much," she said, "But I am going to need a personal secretary. Maybe two." 


End file.
